Database design for database-agnostic applications

Question

What do I have to consider in database design for a new application which should be able to support the most common relational database systems (SQL Server, MyS

Answer 1

One answer people will often tell you is to not use database specific sql and just code to ansi standards. They will often say only talk to the database via stored procs to abstract out any sql. These are the wrong answers and only lead to pain. Coding to 'standard' sql is pretty much impossible because every vendor has such different interpretations.

What you need to to is have some kind of database persistence layer the abstracts the differences between databases (sorry johnstock, this is almost exactly what you said). There are many other ORMs and similar products to do this for every platform,