In order to do this, I will need to iterate over a resultset of ODBC and convert the resultset into PHP native array. Because all resultsets are minimal (< 20 records) this is not a big deal, but my cohort today asked me whether it was more taxing on the system, to which I replied yes, no, maybe too.
I suppose more memory is consumed as a resultset is only going to return a single record at a time and therefore memory is likely to be reused. However using a PHP array is certainly more natural and it removes any dependency on the ODBC/PDO API.
I hate nothing more than seeing fetch_field() type functions in HTML templates when the template is probably best just passed a variable/array and have it deal with that instead.
Other than the abstraction, can you think of any other arguments in favour of dumping a resultset into an array immediately after query?
About the only time I can think where using a result set is good practice is in the case of sending 1000's of emails where the resultset is very large and it's easier to implement so one doesn't have to track each email address as to see who has received or been sent emails, etc. For general application development and especially rendering of results...