Doctrine_Table provides basic finder methods. These finder methods are very fast and should be used if you only need to fetch data from one database table. If you need queries that use several components (database tables) use Doctrine_Connection::query(). $table = $conn->getTable("User"); // find by primary key $user = $table->find(2); if($user !== false) print $user->name; // get all users foreach($table->findAll() as $user) { print $user->name; } // finding by dql foreach($table->findByDql("name LIKE '%John%'") as $user) { print $user->created; }