Disconnect from the remote database.

You do not need to explicitly close a Connection object, but you may do so if you so desire. If you don't, the object will disconnect from the database in a sane way when it is garbage-collected. However, a disconnection may raise an error, so you are encouraged to explicitly call disconnect. Also, garbage collection may not run when the program terminates, and some databases really like an explicit disconnect.

So, bottom line is, you're best off calling disconnect directly, but the world won't end if you forget.

This function discards any data not committed already. Database driver implementators should explicitly call rollback if their databases don't do this automatically on disconnect.

Bad Things (TM) could happen if you call this while you have Statements active. In more precise language, the results in such situations are undefined and vary by database. So don't do it.

Commit any pending data to the database.

Required to make any changes take effect.

Prepares a statement for execution.

Question marks in the statement will be replaced by positional parameters in a later call to execute.

Please note that, depending on the database and the driver, errors in your SQL may be raised either here or by execute. Make sure you handle exceptions both places if necessary.

Create a new Connection object, pointed at the same server as this object is. This will generally establish a separate physical connection.

When you wish to establish multiple connections to a single server, the correct way to do so is to establish the first connection with the driver-specific connection function, and then clone it for each additional connection.

This can be important when a database doesn't provide much thread support itself, and the HDBC driver module must serialize access to a particular database.

This can also be a handy utility function whenever you need a separate connection to whatever database you are connected to already.

The names of all tables accessible by the current connection, excluding special meta-tables (system tables).

You should expect this to be returned in the same manner as a result from fetchAllRows.

Execute the prepared statement, passing in the given positional parameters (that should take the place of the question marks in the call to prepare).

For non-SELECT queries, the return value is the number of rows modified, if known. If no rows were modified, you get 0. If the value is unknown, you get -1. All current HDBC drivers support this function and should never return -1.

For SELECT queries, you will always get 0.

This function should automatically call finish() to finish the previous execution, if necessary.

Execute the query with many rows. The return value is the return value from the final row as if you had called execute on it.

Due to optimizations that are possible due to different databases and driver designs, this can often be significantly faster than using execute multiple times since queries need to be compiled only once.

This is most useful for non-SELECT statements.

Returns a list of the column names in the result. For maximum portability, you should not assume that information is available until after an execute function has been run.

Information is returned here directly as returned by the underlying database layer. Note that different databases have different rules about capitalization of return values and about representation of names of columns that are not simple columns. For this reason, it is suggested that you treat this information for display purposes only. Failing that, you should convert to lower (or upper) case, and use AS clauses for anything other than simple columns.