I don't think getting data in their native datatypes (i.e. anything else that strings) can be done in PHP 5.2...
In PHP 5.3, it becomes possible, if I remember correctly, when you are using the new (new as in PHP >= 5.3) mysqlnd (MySQL Native Driver) driver.
After more digging through my bookmarks I found this article about mysqlnd : PDO_MYSQLND: The new features of PDO_MYSQL in PHP 5.3
It says this (quote) :
Advantages of using mysqlnd for PDO
mysqlnd returns native data types when
using Server-side Prepared Statements,
for example an INT column is returned
as an integer variable not as a
string. That means fewer data
conversions internally.
But this is PHP 5.3 only (provided your version of PHP 5.3 is compiled with mysqlnd (and not the old libmysql)), and seems to only be the case for prepared statements :-(
Which doesn't quite help, in your situation, I guess...
And here's another one, still about the new features of mysqlnd, which talks about this for not only prepared statements : PHP: New network traffic, CPU and memory savings with mysqlnd.
Not sure this has been merged into the official mysqlnd driver, though -- best way would be to try ; but it'll still be PHP >= 5.3 only, anyway...
Another solution would be to have, on the PHP-side, some kind of a mapping-system (like an ORM) to convert results coming from the DB to PHP datatypes...
And yes, this is bad if you want to use operators like === and !==, which are type-sensitive...
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