What is PEAR, What are the benefits of using PEAR, is it easy to use and setup and what are the disadvantages of using PEAR.

Thanks
Peace out

I use PEAR DB to interact with databases. It is easy to set up once you have the --with-pear option on you php installation. Then you would goto your shell and type

# pear install DB

This will install pear's db package.

I find the benefits to using PEAR DB is that you can easily switch between different databases. You can use prepared statements which helps with security and ease of use.