One answer: use SPOPS, which is probably getting a new release within a week. Basically, you get the normal operations (create/update, remove, fetch record) super easy and searching/fetching multiple records just easy. You don't need to deal with datatypes, quoting, whether you're using an AUTO_INCREMENT field (MySQL) or an IDENTITY (Sybase/MS SQL) field -- it just works. For a simple example of how it works, see Re: Re: Re: Object Persistence to PostGRESQL.

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode