Request for Comments: PDO version 1 improvements

• Version: pre alpha 0.1
• Date: 2008-03-06
• Author: Lukas Smith smith@pooteeweet.org
• Status: Under Discussion

This RFC aims to collect a set of ideas to improve PDO version 1. These ideas will hopefully end up in a set of concret feature requests and patches.

PDO is a thin layer above native RDBMS interfaces. As such its focused on providing a unified API on the PHP level without getting too much into SQL abstraction. PDO provides a framework to make the development of RDBMS specific drivers for PDO easier.

PDO has become the de-facto standard for the development of PHP libraries that interact with RDBMS. As such developers have come to expect that PDO minimizes any portability differences to a minimum, while accepting that PDO will not solve most issues in the differences of the actual SQL syntax.

A lot in PDO can be fixed without a new major version.

• Fix differences in behavior for data fetches (possibly add a compatibility mode in order to maintain BC)
• Add a common syntax to specify the DSN along the lines of the PEAR DSN format
• Add some better debugging hooks (like a way to get the last submitted statement, this is important especially when PDO does some rewriting like with prepared statements)
• Fix differences in when bind/prepare issues an exception for an invalid bound value/parameter.
• Add ability to bind short binary values
• Add ability to generate a properly quoted comma separated list to be embedded in a query inside an IN() clause (see implodeArray())
• Better documentation and testing
• Add support for CLOB fields in Oracle (and other databases) and generally work harder on making the LOB behavior more similar across the drivers (see Bug 7943)
• Add ability to manage connection session aspects like charset/collation, locale (datetime/currency format)
• Add limited sub select emulation (see subSelect())
• Improve the prepared statement emulation parser to better deal with quoted strings that contain things that look like a placeholder
• Add support of multiple resultsets for mssql and odbc on all platforms.
• Fix the problems with ODBC prepared statements when executing procedures on all platforms.
• Add support for datatypes like float and datetime/timestamp
• Add ability to retrieve the parameters set in the constructor (like DSN etc.)

• Add support for “IN (?)” type prepared placeholders. <= native prepared statement mandate that all placeholders only handle a single scalar value

• http://php.net/pdo

• http://pooteeweet.org/blog/1048