Overview of the MySQL PHP drivers
PHP Manual

Choosing an API

PHP offers three different APIs to connect to MySQL. Below we show the APIs provided by the mysql, mysqli, and PDO extensions. Each code snippet creates a connection to a MySQL server running on "example.com" using the username "user" and the password "password". And a query is run to greet the user.

Example #1 Comparing the three MySQL APIs

<?php
// mysqli
$mysqli = new mysqli("example.com""user""password""database");
$result $mysqli->query("SELECT 'Hello, dear MySQL user!' AS _message FROM DUAL");
$row $result->fetch_assoc();
echo 
htmlentities($row['_message']);

// PDO
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=example.com;dbname=database''user''password');
$statement $pdo->query("SELECT 'Hello, dear MySQL user!' AS _message FROM DUAL");
$row $statement->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
echo 
htmlentities($row['_message']);

// mysql
$c mysql_connect("example.com""user""password");
mysql_select_db("database");
$result mysql_query("SELECT 'Hello, dear MySQL user!' AS _message FROM DUAL");
$row mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
echo 
htmlentities($row['_message']);
?>

Recommended API

It is recommended to use either the mysqli or PDO_MySQL extensions. It is not recommended to use the old mysql extension for new development, as it has been deprecated as of PHP 5.5.0 and will be removed in the future. A detailed feature comparison matrix is provided below. The overall performance of all three extensions is considered to be about the same. Although the performance of the extension contributes only a fraction of the total run time of a PHP web request. Often, the impact is as low as 0.1%.

Feature comparison

  ext/mysqli PDO_MySQL ext/mysql
PHP version introduced 5.0 5.1 2.0
Included with PHP 5.x Yes Yes Yes
Development status Active Active Maintenance only
Lifecycle Active Active Deprecated
Recommended for new projects Yes Yes No
OOP Interface Yes Yes No
Procedural Interface Yes No Yes
API supports non-blocking, asynchronous queries with mysqlnd Yes No No
Persistent Connections Yes Yes Yes
API supports Charsets Yes Yes Yes
API supports server-side Prepared Statements Yes Yes No
API supports client-side Prepared Statements No Yes No
API supports Stored Procedures Yes Yes No
API supports Multiple Statements Yes Most No
API supports Transactions Yes Yes No
Transactions can be controlled with SQL Yes Yes Yes
Supports all MySQL 5.1+ functionality Yes Most No

Overview of the MySQL PHP drivers
PHP Manual