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:

* Tons of bug fixes, making the package actually work for more
than just MySQL systems.

* New portability features, making it possible to write
applications which can be easily ported between DBMS's.

* 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

--
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
data intensive web and database programming
http://www.AnalysisAndSolutions.com/
4015 7th Ave #4, Brooklyn NY 11232 v: 718-854-0335 f: 718-854-0409