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.

I’m not sure on what nerd-level you put yourself, but I feel sincerely handicapped if I don’t have my computer at my disposal with my code editor and apache service running. It happens quite often that I come up with new ideas for programming or I just have the urge to test something out, and I’m on a computer where it’s not feasible to install all the software and services I need to test these things out. I actually have a couple pages in a notebook (the paper kind) covered with code snippets. I give you the solution.

Even after a few years of experience, I am still discovering more hidden powers in PHP every once in a while. If you have a look at some of my older posts, you’ll see a sort of learning curve happening. Currently I’m in the process of mastering a more OO approach, even if it’s just the database handling. There are, however, a few things I would like to share with you, things you might have been doing the long way before, and now find out that those 15 lines of code can easily be just 3 lines.