You’ve already seen, in previous articles, just how easy it is to read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR. But spreadsheets are just one way of representing structured data – the other, of course, is to use a database. Well, guess what? If your database happens to be Microsoft Access, PHP has you covered there as well!

In this article, I’ll introduce you to PHP’s MDBTools extension, which provides an API to programmatically read data from Microsoft Access database files. If your project involves working with such files, extracting database records either for calculations or for conversion to other formats, you’ll find this extension invaluable. Come on in, and see how it works!

If you’re building a Web-based administration tool to interact with a database, there are some routine tasks that you quickly get used to coding: listing records, adding records, and updating or deleting records. Frameworks like the Zend Framework and CakePHP come with various built-in methods to help with this, and even if you’re not using one of these frameworks, there are a number of tools that can make coding these functions a breeze.

p. This article is intended as an accompaniment to the podcast of the same name, it is a simple walkthrough of some examples of the techniques mentioned in the podcast. It is much easier to visualise queries and data structures if written down, so here we look at an example of each of the points mentioned. I’ve taken a classic example of an employees table which needs to be populated with the clients existing data, which arrives in a different format. Its a common scenario and the ideas illustrated here are also applicable to many other situations and types of data.

Today our special guest is Lorna Mitchell. Lorna is a Developer at Ibuildings in the UK, and is based in Leeds in the North of England. She is a Zend Certified Engineer and the senior member for phpwomen.org in Europe.

Today, Lorna is going to talk to us about data importing.

Hi and welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. I hope you enjoy today’s session as we listen to Christopher Jones present “Performance Tuning for PHP with Oracle Databases”

For the last 10 years of doing web development with PHP I have been searching for a proper way to build my domain model and represent it with a relational database and a set of PHP classes. This has not existed until recently I came across a young open source PHP project named Doctrine.

Learning PHP Data Objects is an introduction to the new PDO data abstraction system included in PHP5. PDO is widely accepted as an effective option for database access while keeping in line with best practices. In Learning PHP Data Objects, the author Dennis Popel examines this new system and explains how to begin using PDO in development as a replacement for typical database drivers. The book is an excellent introduction to the data abstraction layer and also provides essential insight into the inner workings of database interaction with PHP.

Over the summer I started a project which I would like to introduce to you. Junction is a new persistance layer, much like Propel, written in PHP 5 and based on the popular Java persistance layer Hibernate.

p. This is a very quick tutorial on how to allow developers to develop using the Zend Framework without having to or being able to install PDO on their servers.

PHP is the market-leading dynamic language for producing modern Web applications. Its popularity for building content management and e-commerce systems stems from its portability, ease of use, and wide support for accessing database and enterprise data sources. IBM and Zend Technologies have partnered to deliver Zend Core for IBM®, which is the industry’s only certified and fully supported PHP development and production environment for IBM data servers.