mysqli or PDO - what are the pros and cons?

Question

In our place we're split between using mysqli and PDO for stuff like prepared statements and transaction support. Some projects use one, some the other. There is little realistic likelihood of us ever moving to another RDBMS.

I prefer PDO for the single reason that it allows named parameters for prepared statements, and as far as I am aware mysqli does not.

Are there any other pros and cons to choosing one over the other as a standard as we consolidate our projects to use just one approach?

Answer 1

Well, you could argue with the object oriented aspect, the prepared statements, the fact that it becomes a standard, etc. But I know that most of the time, convincing somebody works better with a killer feature. So there it is:

A really nice thing with PDO is you can fetch the data, injecting it automatically in an object. If you don't want to use an ORM (cause it's a just a quick script) but you do like object mapping, it's REALLY cool :

class Student {

    public $id;
    public $first_name;
    public $last_name

    public function getFullName() {
        return $this->first_name.' '.$this->last_name
    }
}

try 
{
    $dbh = new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=school", $username, $password)

    $stmt = $dbh->query("SELECT * FROM students");

    /* MAGIC HAPPENS HERE */

    $stmt->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_INTO, new Student);


    foreach($stmt as $student)
    {
        echo $student->getFullName().'<br />';
    } 

    $dbh = null;
}
catch(PDOException $e)
{
    echo $e->getMessage();
}