Doctrine or another recomended ORM?

Hi, I want to choose an open-source ORM platform to use as a base for many different applications as a standard environment in my organization. ( we used DBI for PERL in the past). I saw and read about Doctrine - Does anyone have any positive/negative experience with it? Is it efficient enough (in the term of runtime)? another recommend environment?? (I have to mention that we are working with relational-DB but not in all projects. maybe there is another environment that is more tailored to the case of just performing queries in constant syntax and security checking?) thanks a lot!!! Miriam