On the php|architect site today John Mertic has a new post looking at a simpler MySQL library - MeekroDB.

I remember fondly back in the day, when PHP 4.0 was all the rage, that if you wanted to interface with MySQL there was one choice: the PHP mysql extension. Then came database abstraction layers ( such as ADODB and PEAR_DB ) and newer extensions ( namely PDO and mysqli ), all with the goal of simplifying the code needing written to be able to get data successfully out of a database. But even then, it still could get a bit complex. Fortunately, someone saw this and wrote a library to make it even simpler. This library is MeekroDB.

A bit of code is included, comparing the MySQLi version of how to connect, create a query, bind some parameters and make the request to fetch the results to the MeekroDB version (compressed down and including a handy method queryFirstField). You can find out more about MeekroDB in its documentation.