ADOdb

ADOdb is a database abstraction library for PHP, originally based on the same concept as Microsoft's ActiveX Data Objects. It allows developers to write applications in a consistent way regardless of the underlying database system storing the information. The advantage is that the database system can be changed without re-writing every call to it in the application.

ADOdb supports the following databases: ¹

• Firebird
• IBM Db2
• Interbase
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
• Microsoft Access
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle database
• PHP Data Objects (PDO)
• PostgreSQL
• SQLite
• generic ODBC
• MariaDB

Legacy, unsupported or obsolete drivers may still be found in older releases of ADOdb.²

In addition to the Database Abstraction Layer, ADOdb includes the following features:

• Schema management tools: a suite of tools to interrogate the attributes of tables, fields and indexes in databases as well as providing cross-database schema management including a full suite of XML based functions
• Date and time library: provides a drop-in replacement for PHP date functions, but provide access to dates outside the normal range of dates supported by normal PHP functions
• Session management tools: allows storing session data in a database table or as encrypted data