title: What does Doctrine's Database Abstraction Layer offer over simple PDO?
body: <p>What do I gain if I use <a href="http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/dbal.html" rel="noreferrer">Doctrine's Database Abstraction Layer</a> (DBAL) over simple PDO?</p>
  
  <p>Isn't PDO supposed to be an abstraction layer itself? As far as I can tell, the only benefit I gain is the ability to use Oracle's oci8 driver with a PDO-like API.  </p>
  
  <p>What am I missing?</p>