After using Doctrine DBAL for a while, I’ve realized that I always fetch an object. There may be some good reasons to fetch an array, but I never do. The documentation for Doctrine DBAL is nice, in fact I think it is wonderful how basic usage is explained, but not everything is covered. After digging around in the code, I found out how to set a default fetch mode so I don’t have to do it in all my queries. You can do it right as you make your connection to the database.