Open a PDO connection with all the options you almost always want: real prepared statements, exceptions on error, associative-array fetch mode, UTF-8 charset.
MySQL's flavor of upsert. Triggers when an INSERT would violate a PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE constraint. Use `VALUES()` (or `NEW.col` in MySQL 8.0.20+) to reference the would-be-inserted row.
A column whose value is derived from other columns and maintained automatically. PostgreSQL has STORED (persisted) and MySQL adds VIRTUAL (computed on read). Saves you from triggers for derived data.
A MySQL upsert helper: insert a row, or if a unique key collides, update the same row with the new values. Returns whether the row was inserted (true) or updated (false).