PHP is a server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language that may be used to create dynamic Web pages. It is available for most operating systems and Web servers, and can access most common databases, including MySQL. PHP may be run as a separate program or compiled as a module for use with the Apache Web server.
PHP actually provides two different MySQL API extensions:
mysql: Available for PHP versions 4 and 5, this extension is intended for use with MySQL versions prior to MySQL 4.1. This extension does not support the improved authentication protocol used in MySQL 5.0, nor does it support prepared statements or multiple statements. If you wish to use this extension with MySQL 4.1, you will likely want to configure the MySQL server to use the --old-passwords option (see Section A.1.2.3, “Client does not support authentication protocol”). This extension is documented on the PHP Web site at http://php.net/mysql.mysqli- Stands for “MySQL, Improved”; this extension is available only in PHP 5. It is intended for use with MySQL 4.1.1 and later. This extension fully supports the enhanced authentication protocol used beginning with MySQL 4.1.1, as well as the Prepared Statements and Multiple Statements APIs. In addition, this extension provides an advanced, object-oriented programming interface. You can read the documentation for themysqliextension at http://php.net/mysqli. A helpful article can be found at http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-mysqli.php.
If you're experiencing problems with enabling both the
mysql and the mysqli
extension when building PHP on Linux yourself, see
Section 17.3.2, “Enabling Both mysql and mysqli in
PHP”.
The PHP distribution and documentation are available from the
PHP Web site. MySQL
provides the mysql and
mysqli extensions for the Windows operating
system for MySQL versions as of 4.1.16 on
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php/.
You can find information why you should preferably use the
extensions provided by MySQL on that page.
User Comments
The date time functions that PHP supports, mysql doesn't. Although both have TIMESTAMP but earlier supports unix's timestamp whether latter has YYYYMMDDHHMMSS string in TIMESTAMP data type.
Set the column type to "CHAR(10)" instead of "TimeStamp" if you want to store TimeStamp values from PHP.
Otherwise neither will mysql store the value correctly nor will you be able to use the stored value as TimeStamp in PHP.
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