PHP is Mostly CRUD

I recently got the book “MongoDB and PHP” by Steve Francia which had an interesting paragraph in the first chapter that talks about how the use of stored data has changed in recent years:

With all the problems with ORMs, you may wonder why programmers use them at all. People were willing to make the compromises to adopt ORMs for one big reason; PHP applications are by and large CRUD applications. Rarely do they use all of the rich features the relational database provides, so giving them up seemed a small price to pay for the benefit of simplified access to the data. Additionally, there weren’t really any other good options. For very simple projects, one could write SQL in one’s code, but this was hard to debug and even harder to ensure that it was done securely. PHP is famous for enabling SQL injection attacks, as inexperienced developers pass variables right into the SQL without sanitization.

Which lead me to think about how my own use of data has changed over the years.