Ever wondered what your PHP application and MySQL actually do? An experimental mysqlnd branch will give you full access to the network communication stream. Using a custom PHP stream filter you can then intercept the communication.

He shows how to attach a filter on to the stream and what sort of output it would give for a query that wasn't valid SQL (including all of the "behind the scenes" queries that the database does to get table information from the schema).

PDO_MYSQLND is in the PHP CVS repository at php.net: PDO_MYSQL has been patched (PHP 5.3, PHP 6.0). Try out PDO_MYSQL with the MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd). Its has new features.

They do a short recap of what the native driver libraries are all about and some of the advantages to using them. They look at some of the "memory tricks" supported by the driver and a look at the prepared statement and procedure support.

• PDO_MYSQLND: R[aŠu]mbling and a breeze of progress
• PDO_MYSQLND: Calling Stored Procedures works fine with mysqlnd
• PDO: Learn how the PDO SQL parser causes bug reports
• PDO_MYSQLND: Mighty multiple-queries and PDOStatement::nextRowset()
• PDO_MYSQLND: Monday morning murders

You can find out more about the project from its page on the MySQL website.

A user comment made clear that we need to send out a quick status update on how to install / compile mysqlnd with PHP 5.2, 5.3 and 6.0 .

The instructions are only slightly different for each of the version, mainly in the version that's checked out from CVS. The PHP 5.2.x part, however, suggests that you go ahead and make the move to/wait for PHP 5.3 to use the extension. It's still in beta and (probably) won't be included in any of the 5.2.x branches.

In the first two parts of this series I wrote about namaspaces and late static binding. In this part I will cover mysqlnd (MySQL native driver for PHP), which is also a really cool feature of PHP 5.3. This a replacement library (not an extension) for libmysql (MySQL Client Library) offering a lot of advantage over it.

He includes some of the reasoning why its a better choice, how it's integrated with the Zend Engine, the memory savings that it will give you and some of the functionality included with it like persistent connections, client-side query caching and statistical data collection functions.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

Included in his list of updates are things like: namespaces, late static binding, the __callStatic magic method and the mysql native driver (mysqlnd). He also recommends that, if you're currently running something in the PHP 5.2.x series, you update to the latest on that before making the jump to PHP 5.3 when it comes out.

First, we are proud to announce that one year after the announcement to develop a new MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd), the new driver has been committed into the 5.3 branch of the PHP project.

The second news is that we will strengthen our commitment into PHP by improving our support for PHP Data Objects (PDO). We will work on a PDO/mysqlnd driver, both for PHP 5.3 and PHP 6.0. Development starts in these days and will include QA, testing and documentation as we go forward.

For those not familiar with the driver, they also have a brief overview of what it is and what it does differently than the normal MySQL driver as well as a look at which driver they consider the best for which PHP version.

Thanks everybody for your trust in mysqlnd and your support! We shall try not to disappoint you in the future and continue with the development. Of course, as the core feature mature more and more, we will try to spend time on implementing new, useful tricks and try to provide you with additional documentation, if time permits.

They also include a link to a forum entry from Jurgen Krieger who ran some tests via XDebug and determined that connection times dropped, query times dropped and there was less memory consumption overall gaining an average boost of 1000ms from a page.

59 - that is the number of statistics collected by mysqlnd. When I started writing this blog post, I hoped it would be easy going describing them. But it wasn't. Some ten days ago, we've had 51 statistics and near zero tests for them. Now we have 59 statistics. And, in a certain way, every figure is a tuning screw in the hand of one who knows what they do.

The list of stats presented include functionality for:

• buffered_sets, ps_buffered_sets
• rows_buffered_from_client_normal, rows_buffered_from_client_ps
• rows_fetched_from_client_ps_buffered
• unbuffered_sets, ps_unbuffered_sets
• rows_fetched_from_client_ps_unbuffered
• flushed_normal_sets, flushed_ps_sets

Check out the rest of the post for the numbers and results (as well as some images showing the difference between buffered and unbuffered results).

Andrey has implemented a little mysqlnd only addition to mysqli_debug(): 'm' - dump memory information. It works like the other options described in PHP: Debugging ext/mysqli and mysqlnd with the only difference that it is only available with mysqlnd.

A comparison of the "before option 'm'" and "after option 'm'" is also included.