Loïc Faugeron Technical Blog

Pomm is an interresting alternative to Doctrine (DBAL or ORM), it specializes in one database vendor: PostgreSQL.

In this article we'll quickly have a look at Pomm Foundation.

Installation

Pomm can be installed using Composer:

composer require pomm-project/foundation:^2.0@rc

Then we need to create a QueryManager:

<?php

require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';

$pomm = new PommProject\Foundation\Pomm(
    'database_name' => array(
        'dsn' => 'pgsql://database_user:database_pass@database_host:database_port/database_name',
        'class:session_builder' => '\PommProject\Foundation\SessionBuilder',
    ),
);

/**
 * @var PommProject\Foundation\QueryManager\QueryManagerInterface
 */
$queryManager = $pomm->getDefaultSession()->getQueryManager();

Usage

The QueryManager allows us to send query to our database:

$items = $queryManager->query('SELECT * FROM item WHERE name = $1 AND description = $2', array(
    'Arthur Dent',
    'Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!',
));

Note: Named parameters are not supported.

The returned value is an iterator, each element is a row (an associative array):

foreach ($items as $item) {
    echo $item['description'];
}

If you'd rather get all elements as an array, you can use iterator_to_array:

$arrayItems = iterator_to_array($items);

Note: Behind the scene the result is stored in a resource, which is usually more efficient than a PHP array. The iterator allows to get the rows from the resource one by one, which can save memory.

Conclusion

Pomm Foundation provides an efficient abstraction over pg_* functions.

In comparison Doctrine DBAL uses PDO and tries to abstract vendor features, so if you're using PostgresSQL and don't need an ORM, you can give it a try!