Since the release of Doctrine DBAL 3.0.0 in November 2020, the 2.x release series effectively went into the maintenance mode. In the past year, we've been accepting mostly the following types of patches for DBAL 2:

1. Development dependency updates
2. Security fixes
3. Improvements to compatibility with PHP 8.1
4. Improvements in the upgrade path to DBAL 3

Except for dependency updates, at the moment, there are no known issues in DBAL 2 that would fall into any of the above categories.

Many projects that depend on Doctrine DBAL depend on it indirectly via Doctrine ORM which until release 2.10.0 didn't support DBAL 3. It was one of the blockers of the DBAL 3 adoption which is no longer the case.

With all that said, the DBAL team announces the plan for sunsetting DBAL 2 in 6 months as of the ORM 2.10.0 release which is April 3, 2022. After that date, we plan to release DBAL 2 only to address security related and other critical issues for at most a year.

All Doctrine DBAL users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest stable version which is 3.3.0 as of the time of this writing.

For migrating from DBAL 2 to 3, see our two blog posts on DBAL 2.13 Forward Compatibility Layer:

• New Release: Doctrine DBAL 2.13 with Deprecations and Forward Compatibility
• New Release: Doctrine DBAL 2.13.1 and 3.1.0 with important Forward Compatibility fix