On the php|architect blog today Bill Karwin looks at a new library - Crystal - a database library to help make it simpler to work with SQL (and make it more human-readable).

Martin [Rusev]’s project is called Crystal. It’s an object-oriented wrapper for the venerable mysql and pg extensions, with the goals of making SQL more human-readable, and providing a library that is lightweight and easy to learn.

There's code examples on the site of how to use the library. Bill also mentions some of the things the project does well and a few things it doesn't - like leaving out some of the advanced SQL functionality in favor of simplicity. He also mentions concerns about SQL injection handling, code not shared between database handlers and the unfinished nature of some features.