# PDO Driver How-To

## Table of Contents

- Prerequisites
- Preparation and Housekeeping
- Fleshing out your skeleton
- Building
- Testing
- Packaging and distribution
- pdo_dbh_t definition
- pdo_stmt_t definition
- Constants
- Error handling

Bill Abt
Rick McGuire
Wez Furlong
© 2005 IBM Corporation
© 2005 the PHP Documentation Group

The purpose of this How-To is to provide a basic understanding of the steps required to write a database driver that interfaces with the PDO layer. Please note that this is still an evolving API and as such, subject to change. This document was prepared based on version 0.3 of PDO. The learning curve is steep; expect to spend a lot of time on the prerequisites.

## A brief note about this How-To

The original version of this PDO driver specification was written by Bill Abt and Rick McGuire of IBM and contributed to the PHP community to assist in the development of drivers for more databases and to encourage the emerging standard for database access in PHP.