dbal VS ifx4dd

In that case, write your own platform and db driver that translates it, doctrine already has tons of work done which can be easily extended : https://github.com/doctrine/dbal/tree/3.6.x/src/Platforms - or simply use PDO directly as it can do raw queries and forget ORMs in general for such usecase.

Symfony goes with Doctrine, which can be installed separately. It has several levels actually. Check the Doctrine DBAL, probably thats what you looking for. It have the QueryBuilder in there as well. https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/dbal.html

Artisan model:show command https://github.com/laravel/framework/pull/43156 https://github.com/doctrine/dbal

I suppose you would then also have to add declare(strict_types=1) in most of the PHP files in the repository, including https://github.com/doctrine/dbal/blob/821b4f01a36ce63ed36c090ea74767b72db367e9/src/Platforms/AbstractPlatform.php.

or, you could build a query, and execute in Doctrine DBAL

Are you using php 8? if yes there is reported issue about second error you get https://github.com/doctrine/dbal/issues/3791

Screenshots would be helpful here, along with links to good examples of popular packages with good releases (for example: doctrine/dbal.)

I am a bit surprised to find that there isn't "official" doctrine DBAL support for Informix. There is a user contributed DBAL layer, but it looks to have been abandoned: https://github.com/josemalonsom/ifx4dd

Are you not wanting to use an ORM? Because if you are okay with using an ORM there is symfony with doctrine and https://github.com/josemalonsom/ifx4dd as the abstraction layer for informix.