Zend Db (standard or table gateway) vs Doctrine in Zend 2 - Pros/Cons

Question

Zend DB (standard way or table gateway) vs Doctrine in Zend 2. Some might say it’s apple vs orange comparison but I would say since they are substitutes (we use one between two) so it can be compared (as requirements are not always crystal clear).

When I started Zend 2 since documentation, books, tutorials were based on Zend DB or Table Gateway, I used it but I was not happy with ways when we have to work on 2, 3 or more tables joins (multiple table gateway adapters) so I switched to Doctrine ORM (also reading so many saying “doctrine is good for large project”). I was already using doctrine in symfony projects so was not difficult but I also didn’t like doctrine in instance like complex joins between entities (extra works), especially slowness and extra memory compared to Zend DB.

Now I am really confused what should I do? So what do you guys suggest?

From my analysis:

Table Gateway

Pros

• Lightweight (keep things simple)
• Native to Zend (better support now and for future updates)
• More documentation-books
• Better community or user support (as it is what many are working on)
• Close of database-tables (I am good in SQL. So feel good)
• More flexible
• Easier to use other doctrine native features such as ACL

Cons:

• Table joins (more complex)
• Primitive in some context
• Handling multiple table gateway instance is difficult.

Doctrine

Pros

• More classes-loosely coupled—better control
• Brings all advantages of using ORM
• Lots of work already on doctrine itself (tutorials-documentations) which works most of the time
• Less reliance on database
• Caching (but also possible with Zend DB Table Gateway)

Cons:

• More memory and slower (compared to Zend DB Table Gateway) for medium project
• Adds complexity (extra files+ configurations + its own conventions)
• Sometimes overkill for medium projects
• More work in many to many relationships between entities or complicated joins
• Extra work YAML-Schema
• Less tutorials-books-user support on Zend + Doctrine

Any others? ( for both)

So, in light of these, which one do you suggest? Working on generic CMS that I can extend.

or why Zend DB cannot/should not be used in larger projects?

I found some discussion here but not as per its pros/cons analysis.

Answer 1

If the following is important to you then I'd say absolutely go with Zend/Db/*

1. Performance
2. Scalability
3. Low learning curve

Answer 2

I did the reverse. I removed Doctrine 2 and switch to Zend DB 2, that improves our queries by a factor of 5x, then we're able to customise some parts of Zend DB table gateway, and we gain 5x more performance on queries (almost as native).

I would say do not use Doctrine if you're gone have large datasets. And remember doctrine consumes a lot of resources.

Answer 3

I have switch to doctrine after many years, i think it is very better than Zend_Db if you can make it compatible with Zend. Doctrine can migrate your database, it means you can update customers databases to latest version just with one command. Another benefit is your entities can implement in several DBMS like mysql, mssql, mangodb and ...

For more compatibility you can use Raman Framework (this framework add some features to Zend 1.12)