Platforms abstract query generation and specifics of the RDBMS feature sets. In most cases you don't need to interact with this package a lot, but there might be certain cases when you are programming database independent where you want to access the platform to generate queries for you.

The platform can be accessed from any `Doctrine\DBAL\Connection` instance by calling the `getDatabasePlatform()` method.

    [php]
    $platform = $conn->getDatabasePlatform();

When creating a connection you can specify a `platform` key to pass the platform
you want the connection to use:

    [php]
    $myPlatform = new MyPlatform();
    $options = array(
        'driver' => 'pdo_sqlite',
        'path' => 'database.sqlite',
        'platform' => $myPlatform
    );
    $conn = DriverManager::getConnection($options);

This way you can optimize your schema or generated SQL code with features that might not be portable for instance, however are required for your special needs.