Doctrine_Record is the basic component of every doctrine-based project. There should be atleast one Doctrine_Record for each of your database tables. Doctrine_Record follows the [http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html Active Record pattern] Doctrine auto-creates database tables and always adds a primary key column named 'id' to tables that doesn't have any primary keys specified. Only thing you need to for creating database tables is defining a class which extends Doctrine_Record and setting a setTableDefinition method with hasColumn() method calls. An short example: We want to create a database table called 'user' with columns id(primary key), name, username, password and created. Provided that you have already installed Doctrine these few lines of code are all you need: require_once('lib/Doctrine.php'); spl_autoload_register(array('Doctrine', 'autoload')); class User extends Doctrine_Record { public function setTableDefinition() { // set 'user' table columns, note that // id column is always auto-created $this->hasColumn("name","string",30); $this->hasColumn("username","string",20); $this->hasColumn("password","string",16); $this->hasColumn("created","integer",11); } } We now have a user model that supports basic CRUD opperations!