For the longest time, I've been using the following basic formatting for SQL queries within my PHP:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM `user-data` WHERE `id` = '".$id."' LIMIT 1;";
$fn = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query($sql));
While this works flawlessly, it can get really messy for longer bits of code, and something deep inside of my conscience cringes at the string concatenation every time I do it. Still, it works and I use it almost everywhere without major issues. (That's a tame example, I'm not dense enough to pass user data directly into an SQL string without escaping it first, etc etc.)
What I'd like to do is something a bit more object oriented, but I'm not sure what the best approach would be. It'd be nice to just be able to sql->insert($values [, $where, $extra]); or something similar, using PHP's natural Associative Array types to pass in the query strings in a more simplified manner. Less flexible? Yes. More readable? Heck yes, and harder to make "silent" syntax errors at that.
What are the community's takes on this? What approaches have you seen to this problem that were the most effective for projects you were working on?
Not that it matters, but I personally don't do much more complicated than SELECTs, INSERTs, and UPDATEs, with occasional nesting of subqueries, but that's mostly because my SQL flavor doesn't do stored procedures.
