title: Multiple concurrent database connections in drupal 7
body: <p>I'm writing a wrapper class for my drupal 7 site which lets me connect to and query my phpbb database.</p>
  
  <p>When connecting to an external data source (as per drupal documentation) you have set the active db, run the query, then set the active db back to the default.</p>
  
  <p>e.g.</p>
  
  <pre><code>db_set_active('phpbb');
  $result = db_query($sql,$args,$opts);                               
  db_set_active();//back to default
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But is there any way to use drupal's database wrapper to create a brand new connection which can be permanently set to the new database without having to do this switching back-and-forth nonsense? surely we can handle connections to multiple databases concurrently.</p>
  
  <p>I have done some googling but haven't found anybody trying to do this as yet.</p>