The Doplio ORM provides a beautiful, simple Repository & Mapper implementation for working with your database and objects. It completely unties your model from the database and provides 2 layers to work with it. A repository layer which you can use to query the database and a mapper layer which you can use to map data from the database to your models and viceversa. Moreover, Doplio doesn't actually provide a DBAL system per se. Instead it relies on adapters which allows you to work with any DBAL you want. The standard package comes bundled with the Eloquent ORM so that you can query your DB using the fluent sintax it provides.