Replace Mysqli with DBAL?

[lox]

We've done some work to replace the Mysqli parts of Pheasant with Doctrine's DBAL project. Thoughts on whether this is something we'd want to do for 2.0?

[bjornpost]

There were some thoughts on replacing Mysqli with PDO in the past. I'm all in favor of making Pheasant less dependent on MySQL (read: db independent). I'm not familiair with Doctrine's DBAL project, what does it do? And what are the pros/cons versus vanilla PDO?

[lox]

DBAL is a database abstraction layer, where as PDO is just a connection abstraction layer. DBAL will actually rewrite SQL to suit different database engines.

Beyond that DBAL offers a nice connection api that would replace a lot of code in Pheasant, including things like better transaction handling and nice extras like sharding and caching.

[bjornpost]

If we want Pheasant to support more database backends, writing all that code ourselves wouldn't add much value. It just adds a bunch of complexity on our side which we have to test and maintain. I'm all in favor of using a 3rd party library to keep our own code base small. Again, not familiar with the specifics of the Doctrine's DBAL project, but Doctrine seems well tested and has a lot of eyes looking at it.

What are the implications of such a change in terms of performance and Pheasants public API?

[lox]

Hmmm, it depends. I'd say the biggest impact would be that we expose the classname of \Pheasant\Database\Mysqli:Connection in a lot of places.

[lox]

Performance implications would be minimal, and it would have huge security upside in that parameter binding could be moved into DBAL/pdo.

[bjornpost]

I'd say go for it 👍

[Jud]

I'm for this change 👍 .

After adding in HasManyThrough (judsonco@acc4603) relationships and HasOneThrough (judsonco@3e0c82b) there's lots of hackiness around getting the current table alias and it seems like DBAL handles that quite a bit better, and the code could be simplified a good bit.

[bjornpost]

@lox, any progress on this?

[bjornpost]

@lox, can you push this to a separate branch? I have some time to work on this.