Stefan Gabos » Zebra_Database

Zebra_Database, version 2.8 now available

Stefan Gabos — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:07:14 +0000

The big news: dropped support for PHP4 and for the mysql extension; Now that we’re through, I can tell you that, even though I am against it, the next major release will most probably be based on the PDO extension because with mysqli I cannot use prepared statements and all the nice methods that the library has (like seek, fetch_*, etc); so, because of the limitations of the mysqli extension I had to “fake” prepared statements, just as I did in all the previous versions; so, in the end, the current release has no speed advantage when compared to the older ones, and I feel like there’s no real gain with this version.

Here’s what’s new in 2.8:

dropped support for PHP 4; minimum required version is now PHP 5;
dropped support for PHP’s mysql extension, which is officially deprecated as of PHP v5.5.0 and will be removed in the future; the extension was originally introduced in PHP v2.0 for MySQL v3.23, and no new features have been added since 2006; the library now relies on PHP’s mysqli extension which you’ll need to have it activated in order for the library to work;
removed the “is_new” argument from the “connect” method as it’s not needed by the mysqli extension; this means that “connect” is now the 5th argument and that this may break your code so be sure to update accordingly;
inversed the order of last 2 arguments of the “query” method (“calc_rows” now comes before “highlight”); if you were using this argument make sure to addapt your code, or risk breaking the space-time continuum;
changed an instance of mktime() to time() as it was giving a “PHP Strict Standards” error since PHP 5.3.0;
fixed a bug when specifying custom paths for the “write_log” method ; thanks Andrei Bodeanschi;
fixed an issue where setting “cache_path” to a path without trailing slash would break the script;
fixed an issue where setting the caching time to 0 would still create (empty) cache files;
the JS and CSS files used by the debugger window are now loaded “protocol-less” in order to solve those mixed-content errors; thanks to Mark Bjaergager
tweaked the CSS file a bit

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Zebra_Database, version 2.7.3 now available

Stefan Gabos — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 11:10:19 +0000

Here’s what’s new in 2.7.3:

the library now tries to write errors to the system log (if PHP is configured so; read more here) when the “debug” property is set to FALSE (as when the “debug” property is set to TRUE the error messages are reported in the debug console);
the library will now show a warning message in the debug console if the “memcache” extension is loaded but it is not used;
cached data is now gzcompress-ed and base64_encoded which means cached data is a bit more secure and a bit more faster to load; thanks to PunKeel for suggesting this a while ago;
changed (again!) the order of the arguments for the “select” method – “limit” now comes before “order”; note that this update made the select() method backward incompatible and that you will have to change the order of the arguments for this to work!
added a small example on how to use caching through memcache; see the documentation for the “caching_method” property;

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Zebra_Database version 2.7.2 now available

Stefan Gabos — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 16:54:22 +0000

In version 2.7.2 fixed a bug that most likely appeared since 2.7, where the “seek” method (and any method relying on it, like all the “fetch” methods) would produce a warning in the debug console if there were no records in the sought resource; also, fixed a bug where NULL could not be used in the “replacements” array of a query; thanks to בניית אתרים

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Zebra_Database version 2.7.1 now available

Stefan Gabos — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:27:36 +0000

In version 2.7.1 fixed a bug where the select() method took arguments in a different order than specified in the documentation; note that this update made the select() method backward incompatible and that you will have to change the order of the arguments for this to work; fixed a bug where the update() and insert_update() methods were not working if in the array with the columns to update, the INC() keyword was used with a replacement marker instead of a value, and the actual value was given in the replacements array; fixed a bug where the insert_update() method was not working when the only update field used the INC() keyword; the generated query contained an invalid comma between UPDATE and the field name;

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Zebra_Database version 2.7 now available

Stefan Gabos — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:46:26 +0000

In version 2.7 support was added for caching query results using memcache – thanks to Balazs for suggesting it a while ago, and to Ovidiu Mihalcea for introducing me to memcache; fixed a bug where the script would crash if the object was instantiated more than once and the language method was being called for each of the instances – thanks to Edy Galantzan; completely rewritten the dlookup method which was not working correctly if anything else than a comma separated list of column names was used (like an expression, for example) – thanks to Allan; the “connect” method can now take an additional argument instructing it to connect to the database right away rather than using a “lazy” connection; fixed a bug where some of the elements in the debug console were incorrectly inheriting the page’s body color.

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Zebra_Database version 2.6 now available

Stefan Gabos — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 09:07:35 +0000

In version 2.6 the name of “get_columns” method was changed to “get_table_columns” as it returned the number of columns in a given table, and a new “get_columns” method was added which takes as argument a resource and returns the number of columns in the given resource; some clarifications in the documentation were also made;

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Zebra_Database version 2.5 now available

Stefan Gabos — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 03:50:56 +0000

In version 2.5 a new method is available: “get_link” which returns the MySQL link identifier associated with the current connection to the MySQL server. Why as a separate method? Because the library uses “lazy connection” (it is not actually connecting to the database until first query is executed) there’s no link identifier available when calling the connect method; a new argument is now available for the insert and insert_bulk methods which allows the creation of INSERT IGNORE queries which will skip records that would cause a duplicate entry for a primary key; the default value of the “debug” property was set to FALSE

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Zebra_Database version 2.4 now available

Stefan Gabos — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:46:25 +0000

Zebra_Database it is an advanced, compact (one-file only), lightweight, object-oriented MySQL database wrapper built upon PHP’s MySQL extension. It provides methods for interacting with MySQL databases that are more intuitive and fun to use than PHP’s default ones.

In version 2.4 a bug was fixes in the insert_bulk method; a new method was added called table_exists which checks to see if a table with the name given as argument exists in the database; the select method now also accepts limit and order arguments; due to this change, this method is not compatible with previous versions; some documentation refinements.

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Zebra_Database version 2.3 now available

Stefan Gabos — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:26:34 +0000

In version 2.3 a bug was fixed where where the script would generate a warning if the update method was called with invalid arguments and changed how the insert_bulk method needs to receive arguments, making it more easier to use.

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Zebra_Database version 2.2 now available

Stefan Gabos — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 18:09:11 +0000

In version 2.2 a bug was fixed where the “select” method war returning a boolean value rather than a resource (thanks to Monil); the class now uses “lazy connection” meaning that it will not actually connect to the database until the first query is run; the debug console now shows also session variables; the “show_debug_console” method can now be instructed to return output rather than print it to the screen; the highlighter now highlights more keywords; improved documentation for the “connect” method.

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