MySQLi connection

[as4s1n]

What is the difference between a mysql connection and a mysqli connection? I was reading a PHP book that uses mysqli connection and has a way to make sure sql injections do not happen using the mysqli_real_escape_string(). Would I have to change the way I form my queries at all or is it just a different mysql connection type? (assuming $query = "SELECT fields FROM table_name";)

[misson]

"mysql" is the oldest MySQL driver. It was replaced with mysqli, which supports an OO interface, prepared statements (via mysqli::prepare) and many other improvements. Note that the old mysql driver has its own quoting function (mysql_real_escape_string), but prepared statements are the more modern approach because they leave less room for mistakes and are easier to use, from a security standpoint. Even newer than mysqli is PDO, which has even more features, such as a broader prepared statement interface (with mysqli, you must bind the columns in a result of a prepared statement to variables; with PDO, you can simply fetch them as a row, as with mysql_fetch_row) and the result rows of a query can be iterated over in a foreach loop, since PDOStatement implements the Traversable interface.

$query = $db->prepare('SELECT id, name, passwd, last_login FROM users WHERE name=?');
$query->execute(array('fred'));
foreach ($query as $row) {
    ...
} 

See "Writing MySQL Scripts with PHP and PDO" for a tutorial on using PDO.