Connecting 

Once you have a DSN, create a connection to the database using the connect() method. This returns a database object you’ll use for tasks such as issuing queries and quoting parameters:

  $db = DB::connect(DSN [, options ]);

The option s  value can either be Boolean, indicating whether or not the connection is to be persistent, or an array of options settings. The options  values are given in Table 8-2.

Table 8-2. Connection options

Option	Controls
persistent	Connection persists between accesses
optimize	What to optimize for
debug	Display debugging information

By default, the connection is not persistent and no debugging information is displayed. Permitted values for optimize are 'performance' and 'portability' . The default is 'performance' . Here’s how to enable debugging and optimize for portability:

  $db = DB::connect($dsn, array('debug' => 1, 'optimize' => 'portability'));

Error Checking

PEAR DB methods return DB_ERROR if an error occurs. You can check for this with DB::isError():

  $db = DB::connect($datasource);
  if (DB::isError($db)) {
    die($db->getMessage());
  }

The DB::isError() method returns true if an error occurred while working with the database object. If there was an error, the usual behavior is to stop the program and display the error message reported by the getMessage() method. You can call getMessage() on any PEAR DB object.