What's the most efficient driver to use with ADODB to access a MySQL5 Database ?

Question

I've been using ADODB for PHP on several projects for quite some time, and I like it for the ease of use and the efficiency.

I've never been too curious about the way that lib accesses data because you know...it just worked :) But today I realized I'm still relying on the legacy MySQL4 ADODB drivers. I'm using MySQL 5.x, and it would probably be better if I started using a recent driver with ADODB.

But there are two drivers I could use :

• adodb-mysqli.inc.php
• adodb-pdo_mysql.inc.php

From what I read mysqli is pretty similar to the old mysql extension, optimized for MySQL5, while PDO is a layer between PHP and various DB systems (including MySQL of course).

Which one of these driver do you use ? Which one do you think I should use, and more importantly why should I prefer mysqli over PDO_mysql (or the opposite) ?

Answer : After a few days and some deep code reading, I ended up using the "adodb-mysqli.inc.php" driver. On a kinda-trafic-heavy site, I noticed the DB load went slightly down, and the network trafic between the web server and the db server went down by about 6.5%, which is good.

The PDO-mysql driver is probably pretty good too, but as said below, it doesn't make much sense to use ADODB over PDO. So mysqli it is.

Answer 1

All tests point towards PDO being the most efficient and the fastest driver. I do not know, however, if it makes sense to use PDO over AdoDB

Answer 2

I may be wrong but from what I remember of looking at the drivers, binding of variables in statements is emulated in the adodb mysqli driver despite the mysqli extension supporting binding. The pdo_mysql driver does however do the binding using the extension, so if you are using this you may get better performance.

Also might be worth adding that I think if you want to use the pdo drivers with adodb you have to use a different connection syntax and pass a DSN, there was an example in the docs. I struggled to get it to work for a bit because I didn't read this.