It is best practice to not even use backticks. The only time they are necessary is when you are using tables that are reserved words, and it is suggested you don't do that in the first place.
Turn off quoting by using the quote_identifier
attribute in your databases.yml. An example of the output is referenced here.
Example databases.yml:
default:
class: sfDoctrineDatabase
param:
dsn: mysql:dbname=database_name;host=localhost
username: username
password: password
attributes:
quote_identifier: false
use_native_enum: false
validate: all
default_table_charset: utf8
default_table_collate: utf8_general_ci