Zebra_Session, a wrapper for PHP’s default session handling functions, using MySQL for storage

Zebra_Session is a PHP class that acts as a wrapper for PHP’s default session handling functions but instead of storing session data in flat files it stores them in a MySQL database, thus providing both better security and better performance.

The Zebra_Session class is also a solution for applications that are scaled across multiple web servers (using a load balancer or a round-robin DNS) and where the user’s session data needs to be available. Storing sessions in a database makes them available to all of the servers!

This class is was inspired by John Herren’s code from the Trick out your session handler article and Chris Shiflett’s code from his book Essential PHP Security, chapter 8, Shared Hosting, Pg. 78-80.

Zebra_Session‘s code is heavily commented and generates no warnings/errors/notices when PHP’s error reporting level is set to E_ALL.