I just came across an interesting article from John Berns about Compiling PHP5 with mysql and mysqli Database Drivers.
As Andrew Gilfrin told in his Weblog recently, it’s still hard to find web hosters who support the mysqli extension. I’m also struggeling with my web hoster to convince him to install the mysqli extension (and of course to update MySQL to 5.0) – but it’s always a long process until it actually happens. So maybe, this article is a great starting point for the administrators at web hosting companies to extend their offers. I’ve posted the link to this article into the forum of my web hoster – cross your fingers that it helps to speed things up.