Data Models

One of the many features that was celebrated by the introduction of .NET was the flexibility of the new ADO.NET data model. For the first time developers had an opportunity to address in-memory data in a standardized way thanks to the System.Data namespace. It allowed access to the data source of choice either via DataReaders (a similar concept graced classic ASP) or by using the new DataSet object. With DataSets developers no longer had to rely on hitting the database each and everytime they required a result set for their pages. Instead they could load the result set once as an in-memory representation of their data and then proceed to work with it as necessary.

While DataSets allow for a great amount of flexibility, they are not a perfect solution for every occasion. For instance, they're generally not a great option to use if you need to cycle through an incredibly large result set. Using a DataSet in this circumstance will likely strain the memory of your server. Additionally, DataSets are a tad bit slower than DataReaders. These are important considerations when planning your solution.

So what is PHP's equivalent of ADO.NET's rich data model? Well...there isn't such a thing. At least as of this writing there is no component within the standard PHP distribution that allows for this kind of behavior. PDO is on the way for PHP 5.1, but this only offers a standard API for addressing multiple databases - not anything in the way of an abstact in-memory representation of the targeted data.

For the most part I get the sense that the PHP community doesn't see this as a problem. There are other worthy priorities that are currently steering this open source project (for example, Unicode support in PHP 6). And even though PHP supports object-oriented features, its extensions are widely functional (SPL and MySQLi are among the small group of exceptions). With this in mind, PHP doesn't strike me as an environment where a heavy object like a DataSet is likely to flourish.

All the same there are times when something like a DataSet would come in handy in PHP. Say, for example you pull a small to medium-size result set from your database. The page that you are working on requires you to sort or transform this data and display it in several different ways. In ASP.NET this would be no problem. You could simply use a DataView object on your DataSet and be on your way. But how could this be addressed in PHP? You could query the database each and every time your page needs to order/organize this result set...but this is bound to slow down your application.

You could definitely write your own data model in PHP or search for an open source implementation - these are very viable options. Here's a cheap way to emulate partial functionality of the DataSet in PHP:

<?php
//Select resultset and save it's rows as elements in an array
$sql= "SELECT * FROM TABLE";
$result = mysql_query($sql, $db);
$resultarr = array();
$resultcount = 0;
while ($resultrow = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
  $resultarr[$resultcount] = $resultrow;
  $resultcount++;
}

/*
Now throughout this page you can use PHP's array functions to transform the result set for each of the times the data has to be displayed differently
*/
?>

This approach is quick and dirty but it may allow you to reduce the queries on your page while you are preparing or searching the web for a more robust open source option.