Question

I have a legacy PHP/MySQL app that calls mysql_connect(). Tons of existing downstream code makes mysql_query() calls, either directly or through wrappers, using this connection.

For new code that I develop on the app, I would like to start using PDO.

If I make a PDO connection using the same host/user/pass/dbname credentials, might I be so lucky that under the hood, PHP will re-use the original connection? Or will PHP create two distinct connections to the server (undesirable, albeit totally understandable)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are using two different APIs (i.e. mysql_* and PDO), PHP will generate two different connections.

And, as a “proof”, consider this portion of code :

$db = mysql_connect('localhost', 'USER', 'PASSWORD');
$pdo = new PDO('mysql://@localhost/astralblog', 'USER', 'PASSWORD');
sleep(5);

Running this will cause two distinct connections, on the MySQL server — which will sleep for 5 seconds :

mysql> show processlist;
+----+------------+-----------------+------------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id | User       | Host            | db         | Command | Time | State | Info             |
+----+------------+-----------------+------------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| 41 | astralblog | localhost:46551 | astralblog | Sleep   |  188 |       | NULL             |
| 42 | astralblog | localhost:46552 | astralblog | Sleep   |  188 |       | NULL             |
| 43 | astralblog | localhost       | astralblog | Query   |    0 | NULL  | show processlist |
| 64 | astralblog | localhost       | NULL       | Sleep   |    4 |       | NULL             |
| 65 | astralblog | localhost       | NULL       | Sleep   |    4 |       | NULL             |
+----+------------+-----------------+------------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
5 rows in set (0,00 sec)

(The connections in question are the two last one, which appeared when I started the PHP script, and disappeared after 5 seconds)