22.9.1.3. Choosing an API

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PHP offers three different APIs to connect to MySQL. Below we show the APIs provided by the mysql, mysqli, and PDO extensions. Each code snippet creates a connection to a MySQL server running on "example.com" using the username "user" and the password "password". And a query is run to greet the user.

<?php// mysqli$mysqli = new mysqli("example.com", "user", "password", "database");$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT 'Hello, dear MySQL user!' AS _message FROM DUAL");$row = $result->fetch_assoc();echo htmlentities($row['_message']);// PDO$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=example.com;dbname=database', 'user', 'password');$statement = $pdo->query("SELECT 'Hello, dear MySQL user!' AS _message FROM DUAL");$row = $statement->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);echo htmlentities($row['_message']);// mysql$c = mysql_connect("example.com", "user", "password");mysql_select_db("database");$result = mysql_query("SELECT 'Hello, dear MySQL user!' AS _message FROM DUAL");$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);echo htmlentities($row['_message']);?>

Recommended API

It is recommended to use either the mysqli or PDO_MySQL extensions. It is not recommended to use the old mysql extension for new development, as it has been deprecated as of PHP 5.5.0 and will be removed in the future. A detailed feature comparison matrix is provided below. The overall performance of all three extensions is considered to be about the same. Although the performance of the extension contributes only a fraction of the total run time of a PHP web request. Often, the impact is as low as 0.1%.

Feature comparison