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Cc: Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>,
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Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 15:55:09 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PDO PgSQL: _pdo_pgsql_notice
From: mls@pooteeweet.org (Lukas Kahwe Smith)


On 07.10.2009, at 15:49, Matteo Beccati wrote:

> Pierre Joye ha scritto:
>> On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Samuel ROZE  
>> <samuel.roze@aliceadsl.fr> wrote:
>>> This is a bit complicated and very different ! Actually, each  
>>> database
>>> works as it want and it may be better to use different functions for
>>> each driver.
>>
>> That defeats the whole purpose of PDO. The meaning of each message
>> will indeed different, but if one needs to call different APIs for
>> each driver, I doubt anyone will ever use them.
>
> Quoting my chat with Rasmus in Verona earlier this year: "PDO is a
> database driver abstraction layer, not a database abstraction  
> layer", or
> something along the lines, but I see your point ;)
>
> However, I've been thinking about this a bit more and I think that the
> different "message" meanings can be summarised like this:
>
> * MySQL raises warnings, esp. when not running in strict mode
> * Oracle uses them as a custom way to deliver messages/data
> * PostgreSQL being a bit of both worlds: informational + custom
>
> By all means, I like the idea of a unified "message" API, but do we
> really need the syntactic sugar (and development effort)? MySQL and
> Oracle drivers can already access them with a standard PDO::query()
> call. Only PgSQL notices require a special treatment because they are
> currently discarded.
>
> I guess this is becoming more philosophical question: is the base PDO
> class intended to only have common and portable functionalities and  
> leve
> everything else to the drivers or should it also try and group other
> similar features to be more consistent even though not likely to be
> portable?
>
> Also I guess that mixing and matching names could be confusing: an
> experienced Oracle developer using "dbms_output" would hardly imagine
> that they can be fetched by calling getMessages() just by taking a  
> quick
> look to the documentation. Same goes for a Postgres developer who can
> easily understand what pg_last_notice() does and would probably not
> associate the familiar notice concept with getMessages.
>

yeah .. its certainly a valid question.
we have stuff like lastInsertId(), which depending on the driver  
either gets the current value of a sequence or the last id generated  
for the connection.
so going by that example unifying things under a common API makes  
sense if that means that it makes writing portable code easier.

so if pgsql and mysql both give warnings that "paranoid" developers  
might want to interpret as an error whatever, then it seems to make  
sense to unify this under a common API .. so the key test is not to  
unify messaging API's but more unify things that are semantically  
similar.

regards,
Lukas Kahwe Smith
mls@pooteeweet.org