sorry for being long:
I am assuming we are talking about these...
http://php.weblogs.com/ADODB_manual
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/core.db.php
well as far as i can tell they are functionally equivalent at the basic level... AODB seems to have a few more specific features... including the use of pivot table creation (a bit plus)... some extensions for creating diplays and form fields based on the tables....
I think at the coding level PEAR is more well coded (well at least more interestingly and more complex) and more structured... easier to extend... and has a simpler interface with it's multiple getX() function... The intent is to be a base for future further applications and not meant to be ONLY a standalone interface to a database
AODB seems to have a lot more support and popularity... has some more specific features as mentioned above... and probably has more people thinking about ways to use it effectively across different projects...
It's obvious that AODB started as a smaller project, that it has been heavily influenced by and has adopted many of the PEAR styles (which they freely amit themselves), such as error handling and using the dsn string format for connections...
I don't think you can go wrong using either one...
personally i use PEAR but i have to admit that i know about using PEAR a lot more than i know about using AODB... and have not attempted to use AODB for a project... so the only reason i use PEAR is that... well... I use PEAR....
as an example of the intent of the projects... AODB is focused at implementing your SQL query correctly, and returning the basic results, and has been extended continuously with bits that make life easier for you.... PEAR is coded very modularly and is built assuming you would want to make something else based upon the code... for example
PEAR is really trying to move onto higher level conceptual use of webpage databases and php.
PEAR DatabaseObject: The Pear project has been moving foreward toward a method of using the database connection not for arbitrary queries but for really making the realtional database model seem an object oriented model to mesh more easily with PHP coding styles....
for example in concept you link an object class type with a table in the database... when you instantiate the object which makes an automatic query to the database to fill in the values of the object you want.....
Bottom line: WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT.
neither is superior to the other in general... they are different and each project team has spent optimizing their code for the places they assume it will be the most usefull... and both have done a good job implementing the common basic features that everyone needs to survive