FYI on the PHP-DB-Raw approach: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

By default, PDO does not do true prepare()s, it just does string interpolation. You need to pass this parameter with the options:

    PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false

And then you'll actually be using MySQL prepared statements. You'll see a noticeable performance improvement for large amounts of queries.