MySQL and PHP
PHP is a server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language that may be used to create dynamic Web pages. It is available for most operating systems and Web servers, and can access most common databases, including MySQL. PHP may be run as a separate program or compiled as a module for use with a Web server.
PHP provides four different MySQL API extensions:
The PHP documentation assumes PHP 7 and higher is used; functionality specific to PHP 5 and below is not documented.
Chapter 3, MySQL Improved Extension: Stands for “MySQL, Improved”; this extension is available as of PHP 5.0.0. It is intended for use with MySQL 4.1.1 and later. This extension fully supports the authentication protocol used in MySQL 5.0, as well as the Prepared Statements and Multiple Statements APIs. In addition, this extension provides an advanced, object-oriented programming interface.
Chapter 4, MySQL Functions (PDO_MYSQL): Not its own API, but instead it's a MySQL driver for the PHP database abstraction layer PDO (PHP Data Objects). The PDO MySQL driver sits in the layer below PDO itself, and provides MySQL-specific functionality. This extension is available as of PHP 5.1.0.
Chapter 5, Mysql_xdevapi: This extension uses MySQL's X DevAPI and is available as a PECL extension named mysql_xdevapi. For general concepts and X DevAPI usage details, see X DevAPI User Guide.
Chapter 6, Original MySQL API: Available for PHP versions 4
and 5, this extension is intended for use with MySQL versions
prior to MySQL 4.1. This extension does not support the
improved authentication protocol used in MySQL 4.1, nor does
it support prepared statements or multiple statements. To use
this extension with MySQL 4.1, you will likely configure the
MySQL server to set the
old_passwords system variable
to 1 (see Client does not support authentication protocol).
This extension was removed from PHP 5.5.0. All users must
migrate to either mysqli,
PDO_MySQL, or
mysql_xdevapi. For further information,
see Section 2.3, “Choosing an API”.
This documentation, and other publications, sometimes uses the
term Connector/PHP. This term refers to the
full set of MySQL related functionality in PHP, which includes
the three APIs that are described in the preceding discussion,
along with the mysqlnd
core library and all of its plugins.
The PHP distribution and documentation are available from the PHP website.
Portions of this section are Copyright (c) 1997-2021 the PHP Documentation Group This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License or later. A copy of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license is distributed with this manual. The latest version is presently available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.