What does data abstraction refer to? Please provide real life examples alongwith.

Just came across the Doctrine Project which has an Object Relational Mapper and a DB Abstraction Layer. What does Doctrine provide that other PHP abstraction layers don't? And what practical use ca...

What do I gain if I use Doctrine's Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL) over simple PDO? Isn't PDO supposed to be an abstraction layer itself? As far as I can tell, the only benefit I gain is the abi...

I am not having much luck detecting when a database query in Codeigniter returns zero results. I have had a good read of the notes on the PHP count function but am none the wiser! I call the query...

Has anyone heard of an enterprise grade database abstraction layer that builds on Google Protocol Buffers I can foresee such a DB tool set would have great possibilities from mobile computing all...

What is the best PHP DAL (data abstraction layer) so far developed under any open source project which we could re-use with good faith? I am finding it hard to choose a DAL for my applicati...

In our place we're split between using mysqli and PDO for stuff like prepared statements and transaction support. Some projects use one, some the other. There is little realistic likelihoo...

I'm working with some database abstraction layers and most of them are using attributes like "String" which is VARCHAR 250 or INTEGER which has length of 11 digits. But for example I have something...

I am in the process of designing a web application (really, it's a hobby, and I'm trying to teach myself design, and what better way is there than doing it :). Anyway, I was thinking about how I wo...

I often hear people bashing ORMs for being inflexible and a "leaky abstraction", but you really don't hear why they're problematic. When used properly, what exactly are the faults of ORMs? I'm aski...

I'm in the process of designing my ASP.NET MVC application and I ran across a couple of interesting thoughts. Many samples I have seen describe and use the Repository pattern (IRepository) so this...