That's a good point. In 10 years I've only had to do that once. Still, I like using an abstraction layer because they tend to hide the quirks of the particular

That's a good point. In 10 years I've only had to do that once. Still, I like using an abstraction layer because they tend to hide the quirks of the particular database - I use MySQL, Postgres and SQLite all fairly often, and by using PHP's PDO I can not worry about the differences as much as if I were using the database-specific drivers.