Perhaps; to avoid any verbosity for any real code I wrap PDO in something like IdiORM and Paris (http://j4mie.github.com/idiormandparis/) or my fork called Dakota (https://github.com/powerpak/dakota). My point was that you can write a PHP + MySQL toy example with PDO that is just as simple as the mysql_query() garbage but is a million times safer in the long run.