Doctrine ORM Basics

When to use

• The user needs to reason about entity states — new, managed, detached, or removed — and how the EntityManager tracks them.
• The user is unsure when Doctrine writes changes and needs to understand persist, flush, and the unit of work.
• The user wants to store and load plain PHP objects in a relational database using Doctrine ORM.

When NOT to use

• Do not apply Doctrine's data-mapper patterns when the project uses an Active Record ORM such as Eloquent, where the model saves itself.
• Do not hydrate entities for large bulk updates, imports, or read-only reporting queries where raw SQL or DBAL is a better fit.

Core guidance