PEAR DB 1.6.0 has been released

[This has be cross-posted. Be careful when following up, please.]

Greetings:

Crack open the beer, PEAR DB 1.6.0 is here! (Hey, I'm a bit giddy with excitement that my intense work during the past seven weeks has come to fruition.)

For those unfamiliar with PEAR DB, it's a package of PHP classes that provide an object oriented API with common methods of accessing thirteen of PHP's database driver extensions:

    dBase, FrontBase, InterBase, Informix, mSQL, MS SQL Server,     MySQL, Oracle, ODBC (tested with DB2 and Access), PostgreSQL,     SQLite and Sybase.

Key links for PEAR DB:

Download:    http://pear.php.net/get/DB
Change Log:  http://pear.php.net/package-changelog.php?package=DB
Manual:      http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.database.php
Home Page:   http://pear.php.net/package/DB

Notable changes since 1.5.0RC2 include:

• New portability features, making it possible to write applications which can be easily ported between DBMS's.
• Tons of bug fixes, making the package actually work for more than just MySQL systems.
• Improved error reporting.
• Getting prepare/execute to work the same way for all DBMS's and allow escaping of placeholder characters.
• Deploying tableInfo() in more drivers and officially moving it from DB_result to DB_common. See the documentation for proper usage.
• Making the test suite simpler to use and work on both windows and *nix platforms.
• Various optimizations, several of which were uncovered using Zend Studio's Code Analyzer.
• Countless documentation corrections.
• Full PHP 5 compatibility.
• Requiring PHP to be at version 4.2.0 or higher.
• Deprecating quote() and quoteString().

If you're one of the lucky few people using PHP's mysqli extension, do note that the DB file/class has been renamed from mysql4 to mysqli, but the online documentation won't reflect this modification until they're rebuilt on Sunday. Similarly, there are a few other features and documentation bugs that won't show up there until then either.

Is Dutch, German or Russian your native language? The manual needs translating into these languages. Join in by signing up for the pear-doc mailing list at http://pear.php.net/support.php.

For those of you in and around New York City this coming Tuesday, February 24th, I'll be giving a presentation about this at the NYPHP meeting. See http://nyphp.org/ for more info.

If you like the changes I've made to DB since version 1.5.0RC2, make a donation: http://www.analysisandsolutions.com/donate/donate.htm

Enjoy,

--Dan

PS: I'm not on this list/newsgroup. Just posting this as an announcement. So, if you wish to contact me, please do so directly or via cc.

-- 
 T H E   A N A L Y S I S   A N D   S O L U T I O N S   C O M P A N Y
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