I needed to get a listing of all the table in our database (I was building a global trashcan so users could restore their own data without bothering us programmers). I thought I would need to do something painful like create a custom query and loop through the results but it turns out it takes two lines of code:

$db = Zend_Db_Table::getDefaultAdapter(); 
$allTables = $db->listTables();  

Another amazingly well done piece of the Zend Framework.