Need HELP with databaseabstraction

Hi all we have a nice big Content Management System written in PHP. Unfortunatelly that was developed for MySql, as the client was not willing to pay for a real Database. Lately it's been ported by me to Oracle ( which was fun, because Oracle is great). But taking care of two different versions sucks, so we'd like to wrap away the database stuff. As long as it's just connection and user handling stuff that's easy and there are zillions of approches for that on the net. But we use a lot of table-joins and and the syntax for that is COMPLETELY different for both Databases. We found Metabase as an abstraktion layer, but that seems to have stupid limitations like max 4000 characters in textfields when using oracle. Now ODBC came to my mind, because i think it can be used with MySql and Oracle. Has anyone any experience with ODBC ? how does it deal wit table joins? are there subselects? Any stupid limitation there? how much slower is it? any knows problems with odbc and these two DBMS???? any comment appreciated. thanks sebastian _______________________________________________ Sebastian Stadtlich mediaworx berlin AG Fon (0 30) 2 75 80 - 25 6 Fax (0 30) 2 75 80 - 20 0