Over on alan@akbkhome.com's weblog, there's a new posting that just might cause a little stir among the PHP users looking forward to PDO becoming a part of PHP's core system, and why it's a bad idea.

Ever since PDO was proposed, there have been warm fuzzy feeling about it's iminent arrival. I hate to say, though I fear it could be the biggest mistake PHP ever makes.! (well I guess among the worse).

So what you may ask is so wrong with it? The major issues I have with PDO are: Reuse, recycle (two capable, cross platform database libraries exist, yet it was decided to start from scratch), Copying C is not always a good idea (one of the worst features of PDO is variable binding - similar to pointers), Cool features dont always make great features (iterators lie at the heart of many issues), Design by evolution, at the beginning or end (PDO just doesn't have the history to support good, solid development), and Too many libraries? (almost ten extra libraries are needed by DBDO).

Not sure if this blog will change the fact, but by not using libgda, I think PHP is missing a huge opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants, and get a world class Database backend, with a limited effort.