If you are new to PHP or just need to refresh your skills, this is the place to start. This series of tutorials will give you the basic knowledge you will need to create a simple PHP website.

PHP is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages.[1] PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications. Textual User Interfaces can also be created using ncurses.

PHP Manual
Prev		Next

XXVII. dbx Functions

Introduction

The dbx module is a database abstraction layer (db 'X', where 'X' is a supported database). The dbx functions allow you to access all supported databases using a single calling convention. The dbx-functions themselves do not interface directly to the databases, but interface to the modules that are used to support these databases.

Note: This extension has been moved to the PECL repository and is no longer bundled with PHP as of PHP 5.1.0.

Requirements

To be able to use a database with the dbx-module, the module must be either linked or loaded into PHP, and the database module must be supported by the dbx-module. Currently, the following databases are supported, but others will follow:

FrontBase (available from PHP 4.1.0).
Microsoft SQL Server
MySQL
ODBC
PostgreSQL
Sybase-CT (available from PHP 4.2.0).
Oracle (oci8) (available from PHP 4.3.0).
SQLite (PHP 5).

Documentation for adding additional database support to dbx can be found at http://www.guidance.nl/php/dbx/doc/.

Installation

In order to have these functions available, you must compile PHP with dbx support by using the --enable-dbx option and all options for the databases that will be used, e.g. for MySQL you must also specify --with-mysql=[DIR]. To get other supported databases to work with the dbx-module refer to their specific documentation.

Runtime Configuration

The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.

Table 1. DBX Configuration Options

Name	Default	Changeable	Changelog
dbx.colnames_case	"unchanged"	PHP_INI_SYSTEM	Available since PHP 4.3.0.

For further details and definitions of the PHP_INI_* constants, see the Appendix H.

Here's a short explanation of the configuration directives.

dbx.colnames_case string: Columns names can be returned "unchanged" or converted to "uppercase" or "lowercase". This directive can be overridden with a flag to dbx_query().

Resource Types

There are two resource types used in the dbx module. The first one is the link-object for a database connection, the second a result-object which holds the result of a query.

Predefined Constants

The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.

DBX_MYSQL (integer)
DBX_ODBC (integer)
DBX_PGSQL (integer)
DBX_MSSQL (integer)
DBX_FBSQL (integer)
DBX_OCI8 (integer) (available from PHP 4.3.0)
DBX_SYBASECT (integer)
DBX_SQLITE (integer) (PHP 5)
DBX_PERSISTENT (integer)
DBX_RESULT_INFO (integer)
DBX_RESULT_INDEX (integer)
DBX_RESULT_ASSOC (integer)
DBX_RESULT_UNBUFFERED (integer) (PHP 5)
DBX_COLNAMES_UNCHANGED (integer) (available from PHP 4.3.0)
DBX_COLNAMES_UPPERCASE (integer) (available from PHP 4.3.0)
DBX_COLNAMES_LOWERCASE (integer) (available from PHP 4.3.0)
DBX_CMP_NATIVE (integer)
DBX_CMP_TEXT (integer)
DBX_CMP_NUMBER (integer)
DBX_CMP_ASC (integer)
DBX_CMP_DESC (integer)

Table of Contents
dbx_close -- Close an open connection/database
dbx_compare -- Compare two rows for sorting purposes
dbx_connect -- Open a connection/database
dbx_error -- Report the error message of the latest function call in the module
dbx_escape_string -- Escape a string so it can safely be used in an sql-statement
dbx_fetch_row -- Fetches rows from a query-result that had the DBX_RESULT_UNBUFFERED flag set
dbx_query -- Send a query and fetch all results (if any)
dbx_sort -- Sort a result from a dbx_query by a custom sort function

Prev	Home	Next
dbmreplace	Up	dbx_close