codebright

Databases 209
As you can see, you have a great deal of choice when selecting a database platform. For this book,
I will be using the MySQL Community Server Edition²⁵. It’s a great free platform, and one of the
most popular ones used for development.
You don’t have to worry about using another database server though. You see, Laravel provides an
abstraction layer, it decouples the framework’s database components from the RAW SQL, providing
different queries for different types of databases. Simply put, you don’t have to worry about the SQL
syntax, let Laravel take care of it.
Another advantage of using Laravel’s database abstraction layer is security. In most situations, unless
I indicate otherwise, you won’t have to worry about escaping the values that you send to the database
from Laravel. Laravel will escape these values for you, in an effort to prevent various forms of
injection attacks.
Let’s weigh up the flexibility of Laravel’s database abstraction layer for a moment. So you can switch
database servers whenever you like, without having to change any of the database code you have
written, and you won’t have to worry about simple matters of security? That to me sounds like a
great chunk of work has been removed from your projects. Escaping values is boilerplate, we don’t
need to do that. Let’s let Laravel take care of it.
Now that we know that we wish to use a database, let’s learn how we can setup Laravel to use one.
Don’t worry, it’s quite a simple process! First let’s take a look at the configuration options.
Configuration
All of Laravel’s database configuration is contained in the file located at app/config/database.php.
That’s easy to remember, right? Let’s take a trip through the file, and look at some of the
configuration options available.
1 /*
2 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 | PDO Fetch Style
4 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 |
6 | By default, database results will be returned as instances of the PHP
7 | stdClass object; however, you may desire to retrieve records in an
8 | array format for simplicity. Here you can tweak the fetch style.
9 |
10 */
11
12 'fetch' => PDO::FETCH_CLASS,
²⁵http://www.mysql.com/products/community/