PHP Database: Development

Polymorphism is an object-oriented programming concept that can be difficult to understand. This article, the first of a three-part series, walks you through the basics of Polymorphism so that you can make use of it in your own applications. The specific example in this article will show you how to use it with different database systems.

In this article, I will explain how it is possible to connect and query an MS SQL server (running under a Windows operating system) from php installed on a unix box. The same problem, in the case of php installed under Windows is not covered here because it is well explained in php FAQ; sadly I cannot say the same thing for the unix case. In fact, there is a multitude of incorrect or outdated sources of information which will cause new people tr...

If you are starting to create a library of reuseable PHP functions, you will soon encounter some typical problems. For example, you will experience name clashes if you start mixing your own components with that of other developers: sooner or later some foreign function will have the same name as one of yours or will use a global variable that you are using, too.

This chapter discusses the database abstraction layer PEAR DB. This package supplies a standard set of functions for talking to many different kinds of databases (from

Abstraction is a technique which simplifies something complex. It does this by removing non-essential parts of the object, allowing us to concentrate on the important parts. In the case of database abstraction, the complexities of connecting to a database is hidden behind a standard API, thereby allowing the programmer to connect to many different types of databases without relearning the methods and syntax peculiar to each different type. PEAR ...

Like most PHP developers out there, I started off using databases to store relatively simple data structures for my dynamic sites. PHP s slickness and ease of database connectivity is no doubt a major reason for its wild success, and also probably a reason why databases get created and used without a huge amount of design and documentation. In my next couple of articles, I m going to attempt to talk about the best way to use databases with PHP. ...

Last week I talked about how to best use indices in your database queries. Now let s talk about transactions. Transactions may sound reasonably straightforward, as indexing does, but there are a lot of things you can do wrong which will haunt you in certain circumstances. The general idea behind a transaction is that several steps can be performed in series, with the capability to undo all of the steps at once if needed. In addition, the transac...

If you want to store binary data like images and html files directly in your MySQL database, this column is for you! I will show how you can store the data via the HTML forms File feature in your database and how you can access and use this data in your webproject. If you have read the article PHP, MySQL and images by William Samplonius here on phpbuilder.com, this might be interesting for you as William stores the binary...

Welcome to part two of the series Building Object-Oriented Database Interfaces in PHP. In the previous article, I offered complete coverage of the role that database interfaces play in Web applications, highlighting the immediate benefits of having a centralized mechanism for accessing, processing and verifying data, within an object-oriented environment. The DBIGenerator class I showed for demonstration purposes in the first article doesn t ...

With websites now featuring full-blown dynamic applications that link to databases, data accessing has become a critical process. Often, an object-oriented solution is wanted to manage the data access operations. This works well, except when certain statements are hard-coded in that can cause headaches when a update is required. Alejandro Gervasio explains how a new category of tools, known as database interfaces, help to solve this problem.

In this fourth and final article in the tutorial series, Alejandro Gervasio updates the DBIGenerator class developed in the previous articles. The new version incorporates features in PHP 5, such as member visibility, exceptions, and other useful items.

In previous articles in this series, we examined the concept of database interfaces, and saw source code for a DBIGenerator class. Working with multiple DB interfaces permits the accomplishment of several operations on many tables at the same time. Alejandro Gervasio demonstrates the power of this concept, with examples.

Businesses that hope to sell items through their website need a searchable inventory system for the web. This article, the first in a four-part series, will start you on your way to building one.

In this second part of an article about setting up a searchable inventory system, we will cover our helper Search class, and some of the things this class will need to be able to do.

In a previous job when I was responsible for hiring PHP developers, I always used to ask questions about database abstraction in my interviews. It s amazing how often candidates with the best-looking CV s, and impressive looking project lists, were tripped up by their lack of knowledge of what a database abstraction layer is, and were unfamiliar with any of the main database abstraction layers. I can t really blame them. It s not obvious to newb...

I m almost ashamed to admit it, but a long time ago, I used to be a Perl programmer.

One of the most important factors in dynamic web page development is database definition. If your tables are not set up properly, it can cause you a lot of headaches down the road when you have to perform miraculous SQL calls in your PHP code in order to extract the data you want. By understanding data relationships and the normalization of data, you will be better prepared to begin developing your application in PHP. Whether you work with mySQL...

Have you ever been annoyed by template engines that force you to keep your templates in flat files? Ever feel like that Content Management System you just created isn t as dynamic as you originally thought? If you have ever felt like this, you may benefit from having your templates in a database.

In a previous series of articles, I covered the IBM DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that lets Microsoft-trained application developers quickly develop .NET applications that run against DB2 UDB databases, whether they reside on the z/OS, i5/OS, AIX, Windows, Linux, HP-UX, or Solaris operating systems. Universal is truly an appropriate part of the DB2 UDB name because the approach used for appl...

With more and more e-commerce sites popping up around the world, the amount of transaction servers will need to grow to support them all. Many of the newer e-comms providers have made life easier for us developers by developing a web based environment to execute their transactions. Let me explain. What do they do ? While some providers make you install application on your servers to talk to their servers a lot now avoid that situation by doing t...

Jayesh Jain Introduction If you are a great fan of PHP, you might have installed PHP on an Apache server and used MySQL as the backend on windows or a linux machine. Most of the people will develop and test their code on a windows machine till they move their work on a production machine. In this article I am going to step you through installing PHP under IIS (Internet Information Server) on Windows 2000 and use Microsoft Access as backend (in f...

System Administration: It s a dirty job, but someone said I had to do it Seen on a T-shirt One of the most commonly faced dilemmas of system administrators is making dissimilar operating systems and tools work with each other. It is my hope that this article will make those system adminstrators jobs a little easier when it comes to making Access and PHP work together. If you want to use your Microsoft Access database with PHP you have a limit...

My July Article comparing PostgreSQL and MySQL caused a stir that really surprised me. Of course, users of both databases called the tests rigged one way or the other, even though I noted that both databases had their strong points under various circumstances. All that aside, we ve been running into some rather grim and serious MySQL problems on SourceForge - most of which are directly related to MySQL s table-level locking mechanism. To give us...

You have a web site with pages accessing a database. You want to use PHPLIB, but do not want to change your existing database to suit. Here is the answer to your dreams. PHPLIB and multiple databases. This set up requires an extension to PHPLIB and explains how to create the extension. You may find this article helps you extend PHPLIB in other ways. Read this article to the end and then think about situations where PHPLIB performs 98% of what yo...

Transactions -- a database management system (DBMS) feature that enables data recovery on internal errors -- raise significant controversy among developers. Some view transactions as a crutch, while others view them as a necessity. // ); //]] Using transactions can save time and money, because transactions enable databases to restore themselves. But inappropriate use of transactions means wasted overhead and impeded performance. And transactions...

Putting all of your content for a particular file on one page can be very user unfriendly to website visitors. Nobody likes to be confronted by a tiny vertical scroll bar! In this article, the first in a series, you will learn a simple way to paginate records from a text file using PHP.

In the fourth and final article in our series about paginating records with PHP, we will look at the source code for the pager PHP class we developed in part three, and show several examples to demonstrate possible uses in production environments.

In the first article in this series, we learned how to do simple pagination of records taken from a text file. In this article, we will look at pagination for a larger group of records, using an Objected Oriented rather than a procedural approach to creating the application.

In part three of our series about paginating records with PHP, we will learn how to make our application work with a relational database system such as MySQL. We will develop a tight, compact PHP class, capable of performing the most common paging tasks efficiently.

Chapter 12 is reprinted with permission by Apress PHP is an extremely powerful yet easy-to-learn scripting language, affording even relatively inexperienced programmers the opportunity to create complex, dynamic websites. It is, however, notoriously difficult to ensure privacy and security of internet services. In this book, we will provide you with the security background every web developer needs, along with PHP-specific knowledge and code that...

Chapter 12 is reprinted with permission by Apress Kinds of Injection Attacks There may not be quite as many different kinds of attacks as there are motives for attacks, but once again, there is more variety than might appear at first glance. This is especially true if the malicious user has found a way to carry out multiple query execution, a subject to which we will return in a moment. If your script is executing a SELECT instruction, the attack...

Chapter 12 is reprinted with permission by Apress Abstract to Improve Security We do not suggest that you try to apply the techniques listed earlier manually to each instance of user input. Instead, you should create an abstraction layer. A simple abstraction would incorporate your validation solutions into a function, and would call that function for each item of user input. A more complex one could step back even further, and embody the entire ...

So you ve got a dynamic site, filled with all sorts of user inputs, whether it be a phorum , or like my own site at knowpost.com. The site htdig.org will take care of indexing and searching your html pages, but if you are like me, you have very few html pages, and must of your content resides in BLOBs in your database. You can t do anything useful using a like %searchword% query, it just isn t coming back relevant. There has to be a...

Chances are that at some point in the life of a web site you will need to be creating content on request. Fortunately (yeah, right...), I had to tackle this early in the development of our Metalloprotein Database site at TSRI. There are several ways of going about this. You can purchase an expensive all-in-one packaged solution (with the kitchen sink and all the chrome), or if you are like me (e.g. someone with not much dough to spend around, an...

I try and wade through as many postings on PHP General as possible throughout the day. Everything from What does $$var mean? to How to I redirect someone to another page? pop up. Two common problems pop up on the list frequently, one is How do I build complex queries on the fly?, and the other is the problem of how to fully utilize all those cool features in your DB. So here is what I plan to tackle in this ar...

Checkboxes in web forms are useful because they allow the person filling out the form to choose from a wide range of possible choices. Specifically, it allows the user to choose some, all or none of the elements. Although checkboxes are excellent form elements for certain tasks, there is often confusion about how to store checkbox data correctly. This article will demonstrate how to store checkbox data in a database, in a manner that follows goo...

We all know how to fetch a row from MySQL, read the data, and save some data back. It s fairly simple and straightforward, with nothing tricky is going on behind the scenes. However, there is much to be gained by using an OOP approach to managing data in your database. This article is a sketch of how one might design an Object-Oriented approach to managing records in a database. All the logic inherent in your data can be encapsulated into discre...

This article is aimed at answering one of the most asked questions on the PHP mailing list and discussion forums alike: How to store binary files in a MySQL database. // ); //]] I ran into this same question when asked by a possible employer testing my programming skills to create a set of scripts to upload files to a MySQL database, download files from it, and also show an image, if the file was indeed an image. Anyway, I couldn t find any arti...

In an effort to bring high ease of use, some of us provide a HTML styled select or drop-down list of selections the user can make. It s not too hard to have PHP build a variable that holds a select option list such as: ?php$OptionList = ; $First = 1;while ($Row = mysql_fetch_array($Result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { $ContactID = $Row[ContactID]; $Company = $Row[Company];br