Paul Jones has a new post to his site about a library he's worked up to provide "persistence-model data mapper" functionality for you to use in your PHP applications in accessing your database.

Atlas is a data mapper implementation for your persistence model (not your domain model).

As such, Atlas uses the term "record" to indicate that its objects are not domain entities. Note that an Atlas record is a passive record, not an active record; it is disconnected from the database. Use Atlas records indirectly to populate your domain entities, or directly for simple data source interactions.

The library is mostly an experiment on his part to create a tool that allows switching from the Active Record pattern to Data Mapper pattern for accessing your database without much hassle. The README on the library shows some of the basic usage of the tool, including the usual CRUD (create, read, write, execute) functionality.