Stan Drapkin — Pitfalls of relational DB access in .NET: rethinking micro-ORMs

NET ecosystem has a void in the data-access-layer space: on one side there is 17-year-old — a powerful but archaic and inconvenient API; on the other side there are various flavors of Microsoft’s Entity Framework (EF) which appeals to beginners and those scared of SQL, but breaks down for anything non-trivial or complicated, and is also painfully slow. This void between and EF has been ignored by Microsoft, which has led to proliferation of third-party libraries which all try to come up with the best mix of simple APIs and data-access-patterns delivering the power and speed of . One example of such micro-ORM library is Dapper. When neither nor EF are fit for the task at hand, how does one decide what micro-ORM to choose? “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.“ We’ll rethink what makes a good micro-ORM library, and compare , EF, and most existing state-of-the-art micro-ORM libraries, considering not o