Is there a use-case for singletons with database access in PHP?

Question

I access my MySQL database via PDO. I\'m setting up access to the database, and my first attempt was to use the following:

The first thing I thought of is glob

Answer 1

Singletons are considered by many to be anti-patterns as they're really just glorified global variables. In practice there are relatively few scenarios where it's necessary for a class to have only one instance; usually it's just that one instance is sufficient, in which case implementing it as a singleton is completely unnecessary.

To answer the question, you're right that singletons are overkill here. A simple variable or function will do. A better (more robust) approach, however, would be to use dependency injection to remove the need for global variables altogether.