Options for Building Your Data Access Layer Using .NET

Thinking of building the data access layer of your next application?

What are your options?

What is most important to you; performance, scalability, security, flexibility, rapid development, etc?

Plain ADO.NET

Pros:

• Use this option if performance is your main contain. No other solution would have higher performance than this as all tools will use plain ADO.NET internally.

Cons:

• It's not rapid for development

ADO.NET Entity Framework

Pros:

Cons:

More:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx

Microsoft Enterprise Library Data Access Block

Pros:

Cons:

More:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc467894.aspx

Web Service Software Factory - Repository Factory

Pros:

Cons:

More:

• http://pooyakhamooshi.blogspot.com/2009/07/repository-factory.html

NHibernate

Pros:

Cons:

More:

• http://pooyakhamooshi.blogspot.com/2008/12/all-about-nhibernate.html

Fluent NHibernate

Pros:

Cons:

LINQ to SQL

More:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386976.aspx

ADO.NET Data Services

More:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668792.aspx

Other references:

• Comparison between Microsoft Data Access technologies: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg144595.aspx
• Video: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/DEV324
• Performance Comparison: http://ormbattle.net/