During the study period for the Zend Certification, I have read a lot about the MySQLi library from PHP and all Zend Certification for PHP5 is based on this library. Considering this, I have decided to take a practical look on the library and it’s really amazing what they have done with the new lib.

For making a long story short, this is what - so far - this is what I can say about the new lib.

- Good Points:
* No more need to use pear libraries or any kind of library for doing muti-queries or procedures, this new library has built in features for that.

* The library consider the connection and statements as two different objects.

* You can set the charset, user, server from the object itself.

* It gives support to Master and Slaves servers.

* It will only execute the query after it verify that the statement is correct and you have bind the statement.

* It has a lot of info available on the object that a Db Administrator can use. Information like Server info, protocol, client info, client version, host info, host version and so on.

- Annoying point

* As far as I know you have to specify the columns as vars when you are binding the statement.

The next step is creating a benchmark between this improved library and the old library to see how fast both work.