After the installation, we will use these functions as normal PHP functions. This is a connection example to the SAMPLE database. You can click on the function to get more information:

<?php
$conn = db2_connect('SAMPLE', 'db2user', 'secretpass');

if($conn) {
  echo "connection to sample: ok.";
} else {
  echo "connection to sample: failed.";
}

db2_close($conn);
?>

Nothing very complicated here, we connect to the SAMPLE database with the db2_connect function, and we check if the connection works, then we close the connection with db2_close.

Now, let’s do something more interesting, do some query on our tables !

<?php
$query = "SELECT * FROM ADMINISTRATOR.EMPLOYEE";
$stmt = db2_prepare($conn, $query);

if($stmt) {
  $ex = db2_execute($stmt);
  if($ex) {
    while($ligne = db2_fetch_array($stmt)) {
      $lastname = ligne[3];
      echo "<br />- $lastname";
    }
  }
}
?>

We put your query in the $query variable, and we use the db2_prepare function with the previous connection ($conn). This function will “prepare” (I’m so smart), it will create an optimized path in DB2, to be more fast. We execute this result ($stmt) with the db2_execute function, who do the query on your database. To finish, we use db2_fetch_array to retrieve our data in an array.

A BLOB example.. or Binary Large OBject, an image, a audio or video file,..

$filename = '/home/mycado/itsme.jpg';
$name = 'My cute picture";

$query = 'INSERT INTO photo (id, name, image) VALUES (?, ?, ?)';
$stmt = db2_prepare($conn, $query);

if($stmt) {
  db2_bind_param($stmt, 1, 'id', DB2_PARAM_IN);
  db2_bind_param($stmt, 2, 'name', DB2_PARAM_IN);
  db2_bind_param($stmt, 3, 'filename', DB2_PARAM_FILE);

  $ex = db2_execute($stmt);
}

We use the flag db2_bind_param we give us more precision with the data type in our request. The first two variables, an id and a string, use DB2_PARAM_IN, an classical input parameter et we put your picture with DB2_PARAM_FILE. Note that the question marks are not an error !

It’s enough for now, I advice you to read the ebook “DB2 Express-C: The Developer Handbook for XML, PHP, C/C++, Java, and .NET‘. About the ibm_db2 functions, you can find them all on php.net.