Pear DB Library on Windows or ODBC?

sdondley

Hi,

I'm new to PHP and am a little confused as to how (and if) to use the Pear DB Library on a Windows (XP) machine. I used the msinstaller to get PHP on my machine which doesn't have any libraries/modules. So should I (can I?) install the Pear DB library on my Windows machine or do I just use the ODBC instead? I'm using MySQL.

Thanks.

maniac1aw

if you are using mysql on your windows machine you can continue to use the mysql functions built into PHP... however if you use PEAR DB would help to make your code not database specific.

sdondley

Yes, I understand that. But should I go with Pear DB or ODBC? And how do you install Pear DB? I couldn't find any help from Google.

maniac1aw

if your planning on using mysql just use the mysql functions

http://www.php.net/mysql

PHP installer automatically supports this....

that is the easiest. If you want to use odbc you have to install myodbc and set up DSN names and other troubles.....

sdondley

I'm already using mysql functions. But I want to know what the possible advantages of Pear DB are over ODBC. More importantly, since my windows machine is a test platform for the site which resides on a UNIX machine, it would be nice to be able to use the Pear DB library but I don't know if that's possible.