On the SitePoint PHP blog, there's a new tutorial that introduces you to the Meedoo library, a tool to make working with databases even easier. In this tutorial Wern Ancheta walks you through some of the basics of the tool and shows you how to use it with a Pokemon-based example.

In this article I’m going to walk you through Medoo, a lightweight database abstraction library for PHP. Its main features include: support for multiple databases, being secure and easy to use. [...] While Medoo is nothing revolutionary, and the fact that it sports a very small filesize matters little to few, it’s still an interesting project that went from being outright dismissed to vaguely accepted, as evident in these threads. It’s on its way up, and that’s our reason for taking a look at it.

Once installed (he recommends using Composer) you can follow along with his examples showing how to connect to the database, make a simple select and define something a bit more complex (like multiple other requirements in the SQL statement's "where"). He shows how to execute manual queries and handling more complex operations like joins. He then gets into the other parts of the usual CRUD handling - inserting new data, updating data and deleting data.He finishes the post by mentioning aggregate functions and some of the debugging options the tool includes.