Question

1. I’m currently working on a PHP application that uses a MySQL database for its backend
2. All of my queries contain backticks to escape the field names. This is so I can have fields like “password” in a query without causing issues (see example)
3. I know that backticks are not universal between relational-database engines (SQLite uses a double-quote, for example)
4. All of the queries in my php application are executed using PHP’s PDO interface

My question is this: If I want to switch database engines, say from MySQL to SQLite, what do I need to do to handle the backticks in all of my queries? I really don’t want to have to go through all of my code and change / remove the backticks. Any suggestions? Am I doing something wrong or not within the boundaries of best practices?

Sample Query:

SELECT
   `username`,
   `password`,
   `email_address`
FROM
   `users`
WHERE
   `id` = '1'

Answer 1

Actually, password does not really need to be quoted… It’s not even a reserved word: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/reserved-words.html

IMHO, the best approach you can take is:

1. Do not use reserved words in your identifiers.
2. Remove quotes from current code; it’s a 2 minute task with any decent editor (unless you’re also using the backtick operator)

Whatever, switching to another DB engine is one thing; building a DB-independent app is a enterely different issue.