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29.3.1 Common Problems with MySQL and PHP »
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29.3. MySQL PHP API

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29.3.1. Common Problems with MySQL and PHP
29.3.2. Enabling Both mysql and mysqli in PHP

PHP is a server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language that may be used to create dynamic Web pages. It is available for most operating systems and Web servers, and can access most common databases, including MySQL. PHP may be run as a separate program or compiled as a module for use with the Apache Web server.

PHP actually provides two different MySQL API extensions:

  • mysql: Available for PHP versions 4 and 5, this extension is intended for use with MySQL versions prior to MySQL 4.1. This extension does not support the improved authentication protocol used in MySQL 4.1, nor does it support prepared statements or multiple statements. If you wish to use this extension with MySQL 4.1, you will likely want to configure the MySQL server to use the --old-passwords option (see Section B.1.2.4, “Client does not support authentication protocol”). This extension is documented on the PHP Web site at http://php.net/mysql.

  • mysqli - Stands for “MySQL, Improved”; this extension is available only in PHP 5. It is intended for use with MySQL 4.1.1 and later. This extension fully supports the authentication protocol used in MySQL 5.0, as well as the Prepared Statements and Multiple Statements APIs. In addition, this extension provides an advanced, object-oriented programming interface. You can read the documentation for the mysqli extension at http://php.net/mysqli. A helpful article can be found at http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-mysqli.php.

If you're experiencing problems with enabling both the mysql and the mysqli extension when building PHP on Linux yourself, see Section 29.3.2, “Enabling Both mysql and mysqli in PHP”.

The PHP distribution and documentation are available from the PHP Web site.

MySQL Enterprise.  MySQL Enterprise subscribers will find more information about MySQL and PHP in the Knowledge Base articles found at PHP. Access to the MySQL Knowledge Base collection of articles is one of the advantages of subscribing to MySQL Enterprise. For more information see http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/knowledgebase.html.


User Comments

Posted by [name withheld] on January 19 2004 9:45pm[Delete] [Edit]

The date time functions that PHP supports, mysql doesn't. Although both have TIMESTAMP but earlier supports unix's timestamp whether latter has YYYYMMDDHHMMSS string in TIMESTAMP data type.

Posted by Chuiyuan Meng on September 25 2006 10:06am[Delete] [Edit]

Set the column type to "CHAR(10)" instead of "TimeStamp" if you want to store TimeStamp values from PHP.
Otherwise neither will mysql store the value correctly nor will you be able to use the stored value as TimeStamp in PHP.

Posted by Everson Araujo on March 4 2008 12:03am[Delete] [Edit]

You can select using UNIX_TIMESTAMP(field), so it will be ported to use like php expects.

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