On the same note as the last article (comparing MySQL and Postgres), there's a new post on phpEverywhere about benchmarking ADOdb and the dbx functions from the native PHP code.

Yesterday, I benchmarked dbx, native MySQL api and ADOdb. The results might be interesting to some of you. This reveals that dbx using default settings is slower than ADOdb because dbx also queries the field information and generates both associative and numeric indexes. The speedup of dbx over ADOdb is minimal when the dbx flags is set to DBX_RESULT_INDEX. This was quite surprising to me, given that dbx is written in C.

They used this benchmark tool to perform these tests on a P3 800mhz PC with Win2k, IIS and MySQL installed. Overall, the dbx stuff performed well - for those that don't know, it's more of a "database layer" on top of your DB functions (similar to ADOdb). There's even a small comparison of dbx and PEAR on the PHP manual page for it as well (of course an internal library will be faster than an external call...)