With MySQL v3 out of the way, and MySQL 4 and 5 being used everywhere now (and if you have not upgraded to the latest stable .. shame on you) I think it is time to point out that you can use MySQLi for your code, software and sites. This blog is to inform you about MySQLi and give you information so you can decide to upgrade and if you have already to perhaps use it on your vBulletin installation.

More information about MySQLi can be found here: http://www.php.net/mysqli and http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/php-mysql-mysqli.html

Using MySQLi with vBulletin might not give you huge benefits, but I have it turned on for my setups.

Some of the benefits of using MySQLi (improved) are:

• support for transactions for the storage engine InnoDB (autocommit, commit and rollback)
• prepared statements
• secure mysql connections
• multi query
• object oriented interface

More details about these benefits can be found here: http://www.charlesrowe.com/2007/06/15/the-four-major-benefits-of-mysqli/

And to save time here’s a great article for experienced developers: http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/686

In regards to vBulletin, once you check phpinfo(); and see you can use MySQLi you can go to your config.php file and set $config['Database']['dbtype'] to mysqli, default is mysql.

$config['Database']['dbtype'] = 'mysqli';

And if your tables and HTML charset are set to UTF-8 you can also set $config['Mysqli']['charset'] to utf8,   default is uncommented. And $config['Mysqli']['ini_file'] to ”, default is ”.

$config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'utf8';

$config['Mysqli']['ini_file'] = '';

Again, I now have my forums use MySQLi and I have no problems, but do not notice a great improvement. I am just happy to think that vBulletin can make use of it.

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