Symfony..maybe..but Doctrine?

Do we really need a sudo-sql language for creating object->db table relational mappings?

I used Doctrine extensively at my last job..and I will not be using it for any personal projects. It's bloated and when I need to optimize a sql query, I have to essentially create a hack outside of the main ORM..which kinda defeats the purpose in the first place.

I much prefer Zend or Codeigniter.

Doctrine1 was a mess. It was riddled with magic functions that were horrible to work with. It was slow, too.

Doctrine2, mixed with entities, is awesome. Its relationship manager is fun and easy to work with and it works very well.

You can even create hand-written custom queries if you want, using its own DSL that's fairly similar to what you would expect.

Use the Query builder, you dont need to use DQL.