Question

I’m fairly new to MySQL and PHP, so bear with me. After some research, I found out…much to my distress…that apparently my site is hosted on a Windows server (by default) on GoDaddy which doesn’t support PDO.

I just recently switched all database calls to use prepared statements through recommendation from another question I posted. I now find out that these aren’t running and I’m getting a nasty error:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'PDOException' with message 'could not find driver' in D:\Hosting\8446415\html\ROOTFOLDER\php\Connect.php:8

Stack trace: #0 D:\Hosting\8446415\html\ROOTFOLDER\php\Connect.php(8): PDO->__construct('mysql:host=HOSTNAME', 'DBNAME', 'PASSWORD') 

#1 D:\Hosting\8446415\html\ROOTFOLDER\admin.php(67): Connect->connect()
#2 {main} thrown in D:\Hosting\8446415\html\ROOTFOLDER\php\Connect.php on line 8

Here is Connect.php:

<?php
    class Connect {
        const expAddress = "HOSTNAME";
        const expUser = "USERNAME";
        const expPwd = "PASSWORD";

        function connect() {
            $db = new PDO('mysql:host='.self::expAddress.';dbname='.self::expUser.';charset=UTF-8', self::expUser, self::expPwd);

            if(!$db) {
                die("<p>Could not establish a connection to the database.</p>");
                include('footer.php');  
            }
            else {
                return $db; 
            }
        }
    }
?>

So what is the fix here? I don’t know what is supported, and I was told to shy away from all mysql_* statements.

I cannot upgrade my hosting account to Linux, even though that would be easiest. Do I need to use mysqli_* statements? How would this particular call change so that the input is safe from injection?

$stmt = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM logins WHERE username=? AND password=?");
$stmt->execute(array($user, $pass));
$rows = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

Answer 1

You need to make sure you have pdo_mysql installed. Check phpinfo() for pdo_mysql … if you know it’s installed, you may just need to uncomment the extension=php_pdo_mysql.dll in php.ini …

To catch your create error and display it nicely, you can modify your code as such:

try{
    $db = new PDO('mysql:host='.self::expAddress.';dbname='.self::expUser.';charset=UTF-8', self::expUser, self::expPwd);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    die('Connect Failed: ' . $e->getMessage());
}

return $db;