[RFC] PDO / third party DBAL

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

I think this would probably be a too bigger change for 3.1 personally.

Doesn't this seem a bit much for 3.1?

We don't want to end up with another 3.2...the whole point here was to go with more frequent, less significant (change-wise), feature additions. Significant rewrites that are not required for the feature additions should not be done IMO.

I agree. For me, the benefits are minimal (essentially adding support for prepared statements, which we can clearly do without), and the cost is a whole lot of hours (even if evil3 is volunteering his time)

If I were writing something from the ground up, I'd be singing a different tune.

[naderman]

Honestly I think it doesn't matter. As long as it doesn't change the API there's no downside to having this available. While I wouldn't put any focus on this for 3.1, there's nothing wrong with working on it. Whether it will end up going into 3.1 or 3.2, we can decide later. We should be discussing the content of the proposal and practical implications, not who thinks this is something for 3.1 and who does not.

[ToonArmy]

Honestly I think it doesn't matter. As long as it doesn't change the API there's no downside to having this available. While I wouldn't put any focus on this for 3.1, there's nothing wrong with working on it. Whether it will end up going into 3.1 or 3.2, we can decide later. We should be discussing the content of the proposal and practical implications, not who thinks this is something for 3.1 and who does not.

Exactly, anything that doesn't make its way into 3.1 may make its way into 3.2 or 3.x if it's ready for the cut off date we can consider inclusion otherwise it's totally irrelevant anyway.

[igorw]

Warning, rant ahead.

Anybody ever tried installing phpBB on something else than MySQL? It's not fun. What happens is all your real error messages get suppressed (using @) and instead you get messages such as "not an error" (sqlite) or "no error message given" (postgres). This is one of the things I'm trying to improve with the initiative.

To fix that with the current drivers you'd have to set a special error handler to collect the error messages or use output buffering to suppress and store them.

Another thing that is utterly broken is the use of error suppressions on functions that might not exist. If you migrate to a new host and forgot to install/enable php's mysql(i) extension you will receive a blank page and no clue as to why. I once spent half an hour looking for this because the framework I was using had the same disease.

</rant>

[DavidIQ]

Anybody ever tried installing phpBB on something else than MySQL? It's not fun. What happens is all your real error messages get suppressed (using @) and instead you get messages such as "not an error" (sqlite) or "no error message given" (postgres).

Add blank/white page with MS SQL Server or even "Service Unavailable"...

[DrStrangelove]

Anybody ever tried installing phpBB on something else than MySQL? It's not fun.

Now that I can believe. Whatever the database backend should be I trust the developers to make a good decision. But one thing seems to be true, other database backends than mysql doesn't seem work well. Why isn't sqlite3 supported yet? With the quality of shared hosting as it is today I'd say it is essential (!) to have a working sqlite3 backend by the release of phpbb 3.1.

sqlite as you know is an embedded database which in php runs in the same process, this of course makes it immune to problems with poor database connectivity which is a big problem in the hosting business. most ISPs, even big ones, doesn't have any good way to ensure fairly allocated resources, this is especially true for databases (!).

[DavidIQ]

But one thing seems to be true, other database backends than mysql doesn't seem work well.

I've been using phpBB off of Microsoft SQL Server for a very long time and I've never had any issues...

[A_Jelly_Doughnut]

Why isn't sqlite3 supported yet?

sqlite3 didn't exist when phpBB3 was released.

There's no one working on an sqlite3 DBAL layer (AFAIK) for phpBB 3.1. As far as I can remember, you're the only person to bring it up in the last six months or so.

[rxu]

There's no one working on an sqlite3 DBAL layer

Well, ~2 years ago one of our board members has posted working approach for phpBB 3.0.x sqlite3 support (the page is in Russian, but can be translated)
AFAIK he keeps it up to date; never tested it, but the man says it's working.

[igorw]

The phpBB.com topic was locked: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1059695 I actually tried to get him to make a proper patch out of it.