How much database abstraction do I need - Alexander M. Turek

SQL databases are an important part of many web applications. But what's the best way to interact with such a database? Do I use hand-crafted SQL statements everywhere in order to always remain in control? Or do I use an ORM, so I don't need to repeat myself too often and to remain compatible with multiple SQL databases? We will take a deep dive into the Doctrine libraries ORM and DBAL as well as native PHP extensions and compare them with our use cases in mind.