a php developer weblog

I recently run some command line scripts, and I had the option to choose between PHP-CLI and Perl. The Command Line PHP version proved to be a powerful alternative to Perl. Php is version 4.3.10, the cli version, and Perl with version 5.8.3, both running on a powerful FreeBSD machine. The scripts I used are here:

pear_db.php

#!/usr/local/bin/php
<?php

require_once 'DB.php';
user = 'your_username';
$pass = 'your_pass';
$host = 'your_server';
$db_name = 'your_database';

$dsn = "mysql://$user:$pass@$host/$db_name";
$db = DB::connect($dsn);
if (DB::isError($db)) {die ($db->getMessage());}

$query = "SELECT * FROM option_blog";
$result = $db->query($query);
while ($row = $result->fetchRow()) {
    $id = $row[0];
    print " - $idn";
}

$db->disconnect();
?>

and dbi.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w  

use strict; 

use DBI; 

use Data::Dumper;  

# database information 

my $connectionInfo="DBI:mysql:database=your_database;your_server:your_port";  

# make connection to database 

my $dbh = DBI->connect($connectionInfo,'your_username','your_password');  

# prepare and execute query 

my $query = "SELECT * FROM option_blog"; 

my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query); 

$sth->execute();   

my $row;  

# output employee list 

print "Employees in the inventory database:n"; 

while($row = $sth->fetchrow()) {

        print " - $rown";

 }   

$sth->finish();  

# disconnect from database 

$dbh->disconnect;  

Running a basic benchmark on the script reveals:

% time ./pear_db.php

0.095u 0.023s 0:00.12 91.6%     3921+2522k 0+0io 0pf+0w

% time ./dbi.pl

0.126u 0.016s 0:00.14 92.8%     1030+1303k 0+0io 0pf+0w

The conclusion is that php-cli is a powerful alternative for shell scripting, and that a similar perl script runs with comparable speed. Both scripts were using a db abstraction layer, with Pear::DB for php-cli and DBI for Perl. PHP in its CGI version offered much worse results, 5-6 times slower than Perl, especially lagging on the db connection time. PHP-cli however is a powerful port of php to shell programming.