A blog comment from Ian makes me wonder if I failed to state clearly what mysqlnd is. See below for his comment. Ian, I am thankful for your blog comment and question! Probably you are not the only reader who needs a little more background knowledge about mysqlnd. Please allow me to answer your question in public and in depth. FAQ: What is mysqlnd, do I need it?.

The acronym “mysqlnd” stands for “MySQL native driver for PHP”. This pretty much says nothing to most people, I guess.

• “native”: Is it written in PHP? No, that would be two slow. As you probably know, PHP itself is a program written in C. Therefore native means C and tightly integrated into PHP on the level of C. This is for sure a good thing as the driver can try to squeeze out the optimum of PHP. …

Recently mysqlnd, the MySQL native driver for PHP, has been checked in to the PHP 6 (HEAD) development tree on cvs.php.net. This blog posting gives a quick overview how you can build PHP 5 and PHP 6 with mysqlnd support.

What mysqlnd is and what not

If you do not know what mysqlnd is or not is, read up the details on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/. In short: mysqlnd is is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. It it closely integrated into PHP and it is distributed under the terms of the PHP license. You can now …

Recently mysqlnd, the MySQL native driver for PHP, has been checked in to the PHP 6 (HEAD) development tree on cvs.php.net. This blog posting gives a quick overview how you can build PHP 5 and PHP 6 with mysqlnd support.

What mysqlnd is and what not

If you do not know what mysqlnd is or not is, read up the details on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/. In short: mysqlnd is is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. It it closely integrated into PHP and it is distributed under the terms of the PHP license. You can now …

Is mysqlnd stable, is mysqlnd ready for wider consumption? Judging from the latest set of tests: yes!

During the development of mysqlnd, the MySQL native driver for PHP - an alternative to libmysql, a good number of new tests have been written. Let’s see how ext/mysql and ext/mysqli perform when running the test suite. Please note that this is a snapshot and figures might be slightly different when you repeat the test runs: mysqlnd is under constant development and your setup is likely to differ from mine.

Is mysqlnd stable, is mysqlnd ready for wider consumption? Judging from the latest set of tests: yes!

During the development of mysqlnd, the MySQL native driver for PHP - an alternative to libmysql, a good number of new tests have been written. Let’s see how ext/mysql and ext/mysqli perform when running the test suite. Please note that this is a snapshot and figures might be slightly different when you repeat the test runs: mysqlnd is under constant development and your setup is likely to differ from mine.

Dear Developers,

we are proud to announce the beta version of the MySQL native driver for PHP: mysqlnd 5.0.1-beta. The software is available for download on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd.

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd. The MySQL native driver for PHP can connect to MySQL Servers 4.1 or newer.

As stated before, we have no plans to remove libmysql support …

Dear Developers,

we are proud to announce the beta version of the MySQL native driver for PHP: mysqlnd 5.0.1-beta. The software is available for download on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd.

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd. The MySQL native driver for PHP can connect to MySQL Servers 4.1 or newer.

As stated before, we have no plans to remove libmysql support …

Q: Will future versions of mysqlnd support PHP 5?
A: Yes, future versions of mysqlnd will support PHP 5.

However, currently we focus all our development efforts on implementing core functionality like Unicode support and support for Prepared Statements. The reason is that we do not want to be distracted by differences between PHP 5 and PHP 6 at the moment. Once the missing core functionality has been implemented, we will try to port mysqlnd to PHP 5. There is no time plan for PHP 5 support, but we see the need for it.

Thanks to both Ilia and Andi for pointing out that we had forgotten to explain our PHP 5 plans in the announcement of mysqlnd!

Q: Will future versions of mysqlnd support PHP 5?
A: Yes, future versions of mysqlnd will support PHP 5.

However, currently we focus all our development efforts on implementing core functionality like Unicode support and support for Prepared Statements. The reason is that we do not want to be distracted by differences between PHP 5 and PHP 6 at the moment. Once the missing core functionality has been implemented, we will try to port mysqlnd to PHP 5. There is no time plan for PHP 5 support, but we see the need for it.

Thanks to both Ilia and Andi for pointing out that we had forgotten to explain our PHP 5 plans in the announcement of mysqlnd!

I have written a long, long blog entry How fast is mysqlnd-5.0.0-alpha?.I do not want to spam the Planets with all of it. It’s aimed at PHP and MySQL users that want to hear in detail what we know about the performance of the first alpha release of the MySQL native driver for PHP.

The following table demonstrates pretty well where we are with mysqlnd. For a first alpha it shows an acceptable performance.

As an example of a realistic benchmark, we have followed the decision of the german computer magazine c’t and choosen the Dell DVD Store. Last year a MySQL team had won ( …