Robert Basic has written up a quick post to his site sharing details on how you can use Doctrine's DBAL with Zend Expressive without having to use the entire Doctrine ORM. DBAL is Doctrine's abstraction layer that makes it easier to work with your database at a higher level than writing manual SQL statements.

The database abstraction and access layer — Doctrine DBAL — which I prefer over other abstraction layers like Zend DB. My good friend James, aka Asgrim, has written already how to integrate Zend Expressive and Doctrine ORM.

But what if want to use only the DBAL with Zend Expressive, and not the entire ORM? It’s pretty easy as all we need to do is write one short factory that will create the database connection using the connection parameters we provide to it.

He includes the code snippet you'll need to define a "ConnectionFactory" to set up the connection and the configuration needed to allow it to connect to the database. He then shows how to set up the DI container with the new container factory as a dependency and use it by pulling the "db" object out of the container.