The Open Source Zone

dbi4php is a database abstraction layer for PHP. It is simple to use (a single file with a simple API) and lean enought to not bloat your PHP application.

It provides a common API for accessing a variety of database systems. This allows you to develop your application without limiting it to working on just a single database. You also won't need to keep looking at the PHP documentation pages to find the correct function name for a particular database since they don't use a common naming scheme. (For example, MySQL uses mysql_connect while SQLite uses sqlite_open.)

The dbi4php tools has actually been around since the year 2000 as part of the WebCalendar project. So, it is a very stable tool that has been tested and used in production environments for years.