Justin Carmony recently put together a blog post looking at the biggest database design oversights that PHP developers can make in their applications.

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.