CI vs. PDO vs. ADOdb vs. PEAR::DB

[eluser]a&w[/eluser]
Anyone know how CI's database abstraction compares to the others? I'm guessing it may not support myriads of db's out there like some of the others (who cares as long as it supports the 'typical' ones?), but how about speed?

I saw where it looks like Zend Framework uses PDO. I saw some entries in the wiki a need to use PDO and ADOdb (http://adodb.sourceforge.net/) .... perhaps because people wanted to use other classes?

Why did CI reinvent the wheel (if it did?)? I came across some links looking around I'm just including for (my) reference:

Speed comparison (see end for summary)
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archive...-vs-adodb/
http://www.tonylandis.com/articles/php-a...chmark.htm
http://www.zfforums.com/zend-framework-c...b-223.html
http://brian.moonspot.net/2006/08/06/mys...y-version/
http://www.slideshare.net/trogers1884/ad...esentation
http://codeigniter.com/wiki/PDO_SQLite3/
http://codeigniter.com/wiki/ADODB/

[eluser]Mirage[/eluser]
I don't know how CI's implementation compares on a performance level. I've used ADO and PEAR, and personally really don't care about one over the other. The CI is intuitive and well integrated so my projects work smoothly. I think that often developers tend to over-emphasize raw performance - for a variety of factors I'm not going to get into.

I can't speak for Rick as to why he wrote is own DB abstraction layer. My guess would be that CI has no dependencies on 3rd party solutions whatsoever. But as a framework, it certainly needed decent DB support. Ergo it received it's own implementation that keeps with the general CI integration and syntax pattern. Seems plausible to me.

Cheers,
-m

[eluser]DougW[/eluser]
I am new to CodeIgniter and am trying to use PEAR for handy query shortcuts sucha s $db->getOne and $row->fetchRow()

I got the database connected with autoload and everything is fine, except that I want to add PEAR load somewhere. Has anyone ever done this?