status of PEAR?

i've been recently asked to port a php application from Postgres to Mysql, and was a little horrified to find how much silly work was involved with this. being used to dbi, and jdbc i expected that there would only db a few queries that needed to change. rather then simply convert the application to mysql, i decided that there should be a layer of db abstraction in the application, and asking around people kept telling me that "PEAR, which is like CPAN" has a DB abstraction layer, and directing me to pear.php.net webpage. this sounded like a really neat idea, but the webpage was just a little shy on information! :) so looking around the php.net site, i found this mailing list, which I hope is not an inappropiate place to send user questions.(i've only been here a day, but it seems to be more directed at developer questions) so what stage is PEAR at? is it usuable? is there something similiar to DBI? where would i find this code, and information on how to use it? thank you kellan (if these are dumb questions, feel free to respond off the list)