There's this constant war going on in my thoughts when I work on a Zend Framework project -- good application design mandates that the number of database queries be minimized. Each query is expensive in terms of both latency and RDBMS calculation time. And Zend_Db_Table encourages you to make lots of queries -- there's no built in way to JOIN with other Zend_Db_Tables, for example. And there's no way to extract the name of the underlying table given an instance of Zend_Db_Table, which makes writing Zend_Db_Select queries in terms of Zend_Db_Table difficult. In a sense, Zend_Db_Table encourages you to implement features the RDBMS already provides in PHP, which is obviously suboptimal.
On the other hand, Zend_Db_Table makes tables behave a bit more like native PHP objects by abstracting away the SQL queries themselves. The user need not worry about quoting all that often, and SQL operations are exposed as simple PHP methods.
What would be nice would be something like Zend_Db_Table, but which would use lazy operations (as Microsoft does with LINQ-to-SQL/Entity Framework/etc.) in order to condense what seems to be multiple PHP statements into a single (or at least fewer) RDBMS quer(y|ies).
Does such a thing exist? Is it included with Zend or not?