Opening a new database connection in Doctrine is very easy. If you wish to use PDO (www.php.net/PDO) you can just initalize a new PDO object: $dsn = 'mysql:dbname=testdb;host=127.0.0.1'; $user = 'dbuser'; $password = 'dbpass'; try { $dbh = new PDO($dsn, $user, $password); } catch (PDOException $e) { echo 'Connection failed: ' . $e->getMessage(); } If your database extension isn't supported by PDO you can use special Doctrine_Adapter class (if availible). The following example uses db2 adapter: $dsn = 'db2:dbname=testdb;host=127.0.0.1'; $user = 'dbuser'; $password = 'dbpass'; try { $dbh = Doctrine_Adapter::connect($dsn, $user, $password); } catch (PDOException $e) { echo 'Connection failed: ' . $e->getMessage(); } The next step is opening a new Doctrine_Connection. $conn = Doctrine_Manager::connection($dbh);