I plan to continue my series about new stuff in PHP's trunk but for now just a short note about something which was removed: PHP 5.3 has different ways to access SQLite databases of all kinds. Two of them are provided by the sqlite extension: The sqlite_ group of functions and the pdo_sqlite2 driver. The issue there is that this depends on the SQLite 2 library which isn't supported by upstream anymore for a few years. It was a logical step therefore to remove this extension from PHP trunk. The support for the sqlite3 extension and the PDO_sqlite driver (same link as above, read it carefully), which use version 3 of the library, are continued. Please note that the disk format changed from version 2 to 3 so you might not only have to change the application but also to recreate the database file. This change will most likely appear in the feature version of PHP, which will most likely be called PHP 5.4.