Creating an instance of an Adapter class does not immediately connect to the RDBMS server. The Adapter saves the connection parameters, and makes the actual connection on demand, the first time you need to execute a query. This ensures that creating an Adapter object is quick and inexpensive. You can create an instance of an Adapter even if you are not certain that you need to run any database queries during the current request your application is serving.
If you need to force the Adapter to connect to the RDBMS, use the getConnection() method. This method returns an object for the connection as represented by the respective PHP database extension. For example, if you use any of the Adapter classes for PDO drivers, then getConnection() returns the PDO object, after initiating it as a live connection to the specific database.
It can be useful to force the connection if you want to catch any exceptions it throws as a result of invalid account credentials, or other failure to connect to the RDBMS server. These exceptions are not thrown until the connection is made, so it can help simplify your application code if you handle the exceptions in one place, instead of at the time of the first query against the database.
Additionally, an adapter can get serialized to store it, for example, in a session variable. This can be very useful not only for the adapter itself, but for other objects that aggregate it, like a Zend_Db_Select object. By default, adapters are allowed to be serialized, if you don't want it, you should consider passing the Zend_Db::ALLOW_SERIALIZATION option with FALSE, see the example above. To respect lazy connections principle, the adapter won't reconnect itself after being unserialized. You must then call getConnection() yourself. You can make the adapter auto-reconnect by passing the Zend_Db::AUTO_RECONNECT_ON_UNSERIALIZE with TRUE as an adapter option.
Source: http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.db.adapter.html#zend.db.adapter.connecting.getconnection
Also refer: How Zend DB Manage Database Connections