Also PearDB for PHP has some nice wrappers for a variety of different databases, that make this simpler, and other languages would have similar(at least I think perl does).
I'll say it has. Practically every open-source database abstraction layer in use today is cloned from Perl's popular and mature DBI, which came out roughly 10 years ago. This is particularly true for PearDB. In fact, I think Pear in general even advertises itself as being a smaller but more micro-managed clone of CPAN, which is one type of resource that is fairly unique to the Perl community. -- Darren Duncan
