PUBLIC MARKS with tags pdo & pear

Although there are already some PHP database abstraction classes available, the advantage of PDO is that it will be available in any PHP installation (so long as it is enabled) at runtime, without any need for recompiling. In addition, since it has been written from scratch specifically for PHP 5, it has a high level of performance. And if you are like me and often only want the key features, then PDO provides all the essential functions you need to connect to different databases. If you need the "full works", then the PEAR MDB2 package can handle that.