With long running processes you can get a 2006 MySQL server has gone away error. This adds a class that calls Doctrine's DBAL Connection's $conn->ping() to see if it's gone away, if so close the connection and let DBAL automatically open a new connection on the next query attempt. This is talked about in the Doctrine's Github repo here. Here's some pseudo code on how to do it:

<?php

namespace Acme\Doctrine\ORM;

use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;

class ConnectionSaver
{
    /**
     * Ping the DB server, if connection is lost close it and DBAL will
     * automatically reconnect on the next DB call.
     */
    public function checkDatabaseConnection()
    {
        /** @var \Doctrine\DBAL\Connection */
        $conn = app(EntityManager::class)->getConnection();

        try {
            $ping = $conn->ping();
        } catch (\ErrorException $e) {
            $conn->close();
        }
    }
}

Then inside the command handler you just inject the class and call checkDatabaseConnection() function.

<?php

namespace App\Listeners\Commands;

use Acme\Doctrine\ORM\ConnectionSaver;

class FooHandler
{
    public function __construct(ConnectionSaver $connectionSaver) {
        $connectionSaver->checkDatabaseConnection();
    }

Database backup manager for dumping to and restoring databases from S3, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP, and Rackspace Cloud. Supports MySQL and PostgreSQL. A laravel specific package is also available for easy integration.

The Sequelize library provides easy access to MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite or PostgreSQL databases by mapping database entries to objects and vice versa. To put it in a nutshell, it's an ORM (Object-Relational-Mapper). The library is written entirely in JavaScript and can be used in the Node.JS environment.

"PHP’s prepared statements (for database access) are fantastic. Not only do they help secure your database queries, but they’re also particularly more efficient for larger products. However, there are a couple issues that appear to make these methods less flexible than we’d hope. For one, we must utilize the bind_result method, and pass in a specific number of variables. However, what happens when this code is within a class, and we won’t immediately know how many variables to pass? Luckily, there’s a solution!"

"Most users at one time or another have dealt with hierarchical data in a SQL database and no doubt learned that the management of hierarchical data is not what a relational database is intended for. The tables of a relational database are not hierarchical (like XML), but are simply a flat list. Hierarchical data has a parent-child relationship that is not naturally represented in a relational database table. In this article we will examine two models for dealing with hierarchical data in MySQL"