How do you connect to a database manually?

[eluser]johnnyForums[/eluser]
Can I use CodeIgniter and not us the ActiveRecord connector? I want to use Sqlite and it doesn't work so well with the built in nor the wiki helps for it. I thought I could connect manually but I'm not sure what to do. Do I just create a model as usual but have a php connection statement in there? Can the view still call it?

Thank you.