I think one of the more difficult concepts to understand in the Zend Framework is how the Table Data Gateway pattern is supposed to handle multi-table joins. Most of the suggestions I've seen claim that you simply handle the joins using a $db->select()...

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Zend DB Select with multiple table joins

My question is: Which object is best suited to handle this kind of multi-table select statement? I feel like putting it in the model would break the 1-1 Table Data Gateway pattern between the class and the db table. Yet putting it in the controller seems wrong because why would a controller handle a SQL statement? Anyway, I feel like ZF makes handling datasets from multiple tables more difficult than it needs to be. Any help you can provide is great...

Thanks!