hi, david, thanks for responding.. David Russell wrote:
good question.. i think it pretty much boils down to the following reasons:Hi Jeff, Just a question - why are you using ODBC instead of PHP's native Interbase connectivity? ODBC is definitely slower.
1) my IP dept has voiced the possibility of switching away from IB at some point because of the lack of support and common user base. i want the php code to use unified drivers so that i don't have to re-write everything at that time.
2) the php-ib api is not automatically compiled in to the php distribution which comes from redhat. while i'm not normally averse to a separate compile, it is extra effort, esp. in the case of php, where there are many compile-time flags to mimick correctly from the redhat compile. not getting these right could potentially give us even more problems down the road with more quirky "undocumented" behavior which is owed solely to my own compilation and a flag i didn't set right. i'd rather not get into it.
3) on linux (where our apache/php sits), the odbc drivers use the same shared libraries that odbc does (the odbc easysoft drivers) since as i understand it, in the later versions of ib, borland decided that the only way to connect to a remote ib server was with the unixodbc/easysoft drivers anyway, and removed the ib-specific connection libraries (something like that).
4) while much less important than the first 3, i do see a Unified ODBC interface as advantageous to us all. the various db api's are all different. thus, when i read books about PHP, and look in the sections on databasing, i see the MySQL api referred to. this doesn't do me any good because i'm an interbase user. if we all used the same api, odbc, then, even though it may be pie in the sky, we'd all -- authors, users, etc etc -- benefit from a common knowledge base, not to mention a robust and dependable api.
5) i wanted something simple: read a blob into a string (currently works) in a select statement, and write the BLOB back out from a string via update (currently does not work with ib but apparently does with firebird and others). the php-odbc api promises this ease of use, and the php-ib api does not. :(
this just in:
the easysoft guys wrote back to me btw, just today.
it turns out it is probably a bug -- firebird does not have this behavior, but interbase does. they do not think it is an easysoft issue. they think if we juse use firebird here we will be fine.
but we cannot risk switching to firebird, here. my IP dept would never go for it. maybe an upgrade to ib 7 would fix it, i don't know.. i am still looking further into it. anyone have any contacts at interbase?
I don't know anything about BLOBs under ODBC, but I could help you withthank you for the offer. i will take you up on it if i do in fact end up going the php-ib api route, or in the unprobably event we switch to firebird (which the easysoft guys say works right with php-odbc api anyway).. i do appreciate your taking the time out of your day to respond, david. that was kind of you, and thank you very much.
direct Interbase connectivity, which I use extensively (but not for text
fields - it makes it difficult and slow to search).
Let me know if you need help with direct connection BLOB handling under
Interbase. I am using Firebird, not that it should make any difference.
--
Jeff Stern 949-824-2326 jastern@uci.edu
Social Sciences Computing Services
University of California, Irvine
3151 Social Science Plz
Irvine CA 92697-5100
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