It seems the forums here at Wgg don’t get a lot of screen-time, so I’ve decided to expand on a long lost forum topic to compare two alternatives to regular old MySQL database accessing in PHP. I will be looking at MySQLi, where the ‘i’ stands for improved, and SQLite, where the ‘ite’ stands for light.

It wasn't long ago that I've discovered that I'm not just stuck with mysql for effectively operating databases from PHP. For very small websites that need tiny databases, it's maybe easier to stick with sqlite, which uses PHP 5's built in database engine. It's fast, but limited.

For those who're still using big databases, and have a mysql server running the database, I recommend you to switch to mysqli. The 'i' on the end stands for 'improved'. Lots of the queries are exactly the same, but improved sounds good to me. To make the switch, you don't even need to rebuild your database.