DB_DataObject

Hello, I have a couple of questions about DB_DataObject. I am a developer putting together a rather large website and we need some serious data abstraction to clean things up. We have master and slave databases and we do all the writing to the master and reads all come from the slaves. (usually) Is there a way to set up two database objects one to read from and one to write from automatically within the DB_DataObject class. Also if we already have a pear::DB object instantiated is is possible to just use that object instead of creating another connection to the db. We try to keep one connection open across the application. To limit the connection times. Thanks for any help. -Steven