I've thought of some of the biggest oversights I've had when working with PHP and MySQL and put them in a list. This is my personal list, and I'm sure some people can think of some other oversights that belong on the list as well. This list is just for PHP & MySQL, not PHP and any database. I know many people like using software like Doctrine to allow switching between different database types. That is beyond the scope of this article.

He includes a list of five - not having a data access layer, designing for only one database connection, not including developer logging, having queries written in procedural code and no separation of reads and writes to the database.