&gt; I spent a good while trying to integrate Doctrine into my projects, and in the end I found it bloated and overly verbose and went back to PDO.<p>Were you integrating Doctrine, or were you integrating Doctrine&#x2F;DBAL, as the parent poster recommends?<p>Doctrine&#x2F;DBAL is a bunch of useful helpers around PDO which take out a lot of the repetitive coding (and let me delete many home-grown methods I&#x27;d created to &#x27;help&#x27; PDO)