In this new post from Wez Furlong, he looks ar some of the things that the native MySQL client library does (the silly things) and recommends an alternative with the PDO libraries.
I've recently discovered a few things about how the mysql client library does things that seem a bit silly to me, so I'm going to share them with you.
Among the things he mentions functionality (dealing with prepared statements) like "native prepared statements cannot take advantage of the query cache" and "native prepared statements cannot execute certain types of queries". The gives a simple line of code to make the database functionality (in PHP 5.1.3 and later) use the native PDO query parser to be loaded versus the one for the standard MySQL client libraries.
