After reading This article Jeremy Zawodny responds with a bit of a rant, taking aim at at Database Abstraction Layers and men preaching false hopes.

The author is also clearly unhappy with the alternative, having mysql_foo() and mysql_bar() functions all over the application. Well, I may be nuts here, but I never have that problem. I use a revolutionary new programming technique. Instead of littering my code with those calls, I put my core data access layer into a library--a separate piece of reusable code that I can include in various parts of my application and... reuse!