Upgrading to Elegant and Versatile Database Architecture Using PHP5 Data Objects

Developers often hold off from using newer MySQL features to maintain compatibility with earlier versions, and over time your queries become old-school. How can you take advantage of newer MySQL syntax yet keep it backwards compatible?

During 2007 the community of developers around SilverStripe, a modern open source CMS, were faced with this problem and used the Google Summer of Code to solve it. Months were spent researching and re-architecting so that the tens of thousands of people downloading SilverStripe would discover it worked with various versions of MySQL, Postgres or MS SQL.

The session takes you through a technical case study, demonstrating PHP code and SQL statements, and giving advice on how to upgrade your website or application to be protected against the future as well as the past.

1. Why PHP5 Data Objects was chosen instead of ADOdb, ADOdb Lite, MDB / MDB2, Propel, Creole, and EZPDO.

2. Brief primer on PDO

3. How to overhaul your database core yet keep it sufficiently stable to roll out new features being downloaded thousands of times

4. Writing versatile SQL statements that aren’t ugly

5. Elegantly dealing with the various SQL syntaxes of different MySQL versions so you can take advantage of newer MySQL features, and fall back to less-elegant, slower queries for older versions

6. How to keep your SQL continuously up to date, and trimming off your old-school queries.