Question

I’m using zend framework. currently everytime I need to use the db I go ahead and connect to the DB:

function connect()
{
    $connParams = array(
        "host"   => $host,
        "port"    => $port,
        "username" => $username,
        "password" => $password,
        "dbname"   => $dbname
    );

    $db = new Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Mysql($connParams);
    return $db
}

so I would just call the connect() function everytime I need to use the db

My question is…suppose I want to reuse $db everywhere in my site and only connect once in the very initial stage of the site load and then close the connection right before the site gets sent to the user, what would be the best practice to accomplish this?

Which file in Zend should I save $db in, what method should I use to save it (global variable?), and which file should I do the connection closing in?

Answer 1

Your best best may be to move all of your db connection code into a separate class in which you can set a static $db var.

protected static $_db;

public static function connect()
{
    if (self::$_db == null) {
        $config = Zend_Config_Xml(); // whatever you'd use

        self::$_db = Zend_Db::factory($config->database);
        self::$_db->setFetchMode(Zend_Db::FETCH_OBJ);
        self::$_db->query('SET NAMES UTF8');

        Zend_Db_Table::setDefaultAdapter(self::$_db); // optional
    }

    return self::$_db;
}

public static function close()
{
    if (self::$_db != null) {
        self::$_db->closeConnection();
    }
}

According to Zend:

Normally it is not necessary to close a database connection. PHP automatically cleans up all resources and the end of a request. Database extensions are designed to close the connection as the reference to the resource object is cleaned up.

However, if you have a long-duration PHP script that initiates many database connections, you might need to close the connection, to avoid exhausting the capacity of your RDBMS server. You can use the Adapter’s closeConnection() method to explicitly close the underlying database connection.