• Added numCols() function to the DB_result object
• Added seek() method to the DB_result object
• Enabled you to specify the fetchmode for getRow() and getAll()
• Made the test script easier to navigate
• Added reset() method to the DB_result object

You can find out more about the project here or just download this new version and check out the documentation to get you started.

PEAR::DB is all well and good if you want to connect to multiple databases (I assume, I've never actually used it with anything other than mysql) but it is somewhat hefty on the bad side of 60k. Not a good thing if you're not using some sort of accelerator and have a high traffic site. Here's a class which replicates the PEAR::DB API (the bits that I use anyhoo) and weighs in at a much nicer ~11k. Sweet.

The class is posted for download here as a simple PHP source file with functions and values named similar to those in the PEAR::DB package.

If you use PEAR::MDB2, you can set a custom debug handler and collect all the queries you execute for debugging and performance tunning purposes, as shown before. But what if you're using PEAR::DB? Well, since PEAR::DB doesn't allow you such a functionality out of the box, you can hack it a bit to get similar results.

He creates a simple app to help with the illustration - a number of select queries to grab zipcode information from the database. As it stands, the PEAR::DB package doesn't handle the debugging well, so he adds in a few more lines to buffer the connection and some reporting code to check the resulting output (as well as some of his sample reports).

The wrapper functionality has been included in the MDB2 package for a while now, and is designed to make things simple when switching from one package to another (as seamless as possible).

You can download the latest version of MDB2 from its page on the PEAR site.