My friend Kien and I have improved upon an earlier version of an ORM that he had written prior to PHP 5.3. We have essentially ported over Ruby on Rails’ Active Record to PHP. It is still lacking some key features we want such as transactions, composite primary key support, a few more adapters (only MySQL and SQLite 3 work right now). But, we are very close to finishing this stuff up. You can take a look at PHP ActiveRecord with PHP 5.3.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Jacques Fuentes

Try PHP ADOdb.

I can’t say it’s the best, because I haven’t used the others. But it’s fast, it supports Memcached and caching.

And it’s waaaay faster than Zend Framework’s DB/Select.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Salam Fall

If you are looking for an ORM, like Hibernate, you should have look at PMO.

It can be easily integrated in an SOA architecture (there is only a webservice classe to develop).

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by anonymous

Try RedBean, its requires:

• No configuration
• No database (it creates everything on the fly)
• No models
• etc.

It even does all the locking and transactions for you and monitors performance in the background. (Heck! it even does garbage collection….) Best of all… you don’t have to write a single… line of code… Jesus this, ORM layer, saved me ass!

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by winterswk