I just finished an introduction course in PHP, and throughout the stackoverflow forum people have recommended that I switch to PDO, prepared statements or MYSQLi, I briefly checked the manual but most of it went over my head.
I've been using mysql_* functions up till now so these concepts are new to me. I think they are used to access and perform database specific actions, but I'm not sure.
So what is the difference between PDO, prepared statements and MySQLi, are they different features that accomplishes the same task? Are they compatible in a script or is it "choose one or the other"? And lastly which offers the best performance?
Update: Thanks for the answers, I'll be hunting for more PDO tutorials.
For reference I also found the following posts useful:
Answer
At the basic level the mysql, mysqli and PDO extensions all answer the question how do I talk to the database? They all provide functions and functionality to connect to a database and send and retrieve data from it. You can use them all at the same time establishing several connections to the database at once, but that's typically nonsense.
mysql* is a very simple extension that basically allows you to connect to the database, send it SQL queries and not much else.
mysqli improves this (as the name suggests) by adding parameterized queries and a few other things into the mix.
PDO is an extension that abstracts several database drivers into one package, i.e. it allows you to use the same code to connect to MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server and a number of other databases without needing to use database specific extensions or rewrite your code when you switch databases (in theory at least). It also supports parameterized queries.
If you know you're going to be using MySQL exclusively, mysqli is a good choice. Especially since you can use it in a procedural way, what you're already used to from the mysql extension. If you're not familiar with OOP, that's helpful. Otherwise, PDO is a nice object oriented, flexible database connector.
* Note that the mysql extension is now deprecated and will be removed sometime in the future. That's because it is ancient, full of bad practices and lacks some modern features. Don't use it to write new code.