In his latest post Dougal Campbell shares his findings from a bug he was having with a plugin in WordPress. It revolved around the use of mysql or mysqli and errors being thrown to his logs.

The plugin had previously worked fine (it generates a sidebar widget), and I wasn’t actively working on my site, so I wasn’t really sure when it had quit working. In the course of debugging the problem, I discovered that the plugin was throwing warnings in my PHP error log regarding the mysql_real_escape_string() function. As a quick fix, I simply replaced all of those calls with WordPress’ esc_sql() function. Voila, problem fixed.

He was interested in why this worked, though, and went digging in the code. As it turns out, the WordPress code tries to determine which mysql extension you have support for. As it turns out, his installation fit the "mysqli profile" so the "mysql_real_escape_string" wasn't available. To the WordPress users out there, he suggests esc_sql or $wpdb->prepare() instead.

There's been some rumors floating around about the possibility of PHP's MySQL support going away in upcoming versions of the language. In his latest post Johannes Schlüter tries to bring a bit of clarity to these rumors and what's actually being removed.

Over the last few days different people asked me for comments about PHP dropping MySQL support. These questions confused me, but meanwhile I figured out where these rumors come from and what they mean. The simple facts are: No, PHP is not dropping MySQL support and we, Oracle's MySQL team, continue working with the PHP community.

He suggests that the confusion might have come from the recent changes to "soft deprecate" the oldest ext/mysql functionality and warn users against using it in their applications. He talks about the history of MySQL support in PHP and one project that removing it could adversely effect (WordPress).