PDO is an acronym for PHP Data Objects. PDO is a lean, consistent way to access databases. PDO offers great advantages over msSQL and mySQL when it comes to security and data handling.

The core advantage of PDO over MySQLi is in its database driver support. At the time of this writing, PDO supports 12 different drivers, opposed to MySQLi, which supports MySQL only.

What does this mean? Well, in situations when you have to switch your project to use another database, PDO makes the process transparent. So all you'll have to do is change the connection string and a few queries - if they use any methods which aren't supported by your new database. With MySQLi, you will need to rewrite every chunk of code - queries included.

Since 2015 we at I'm Going Live have stopped using MySQL and switched all of our database interactions and APIs to use PDO