Why PLINQO?

We have gone through what seems like every ORM possible and we strongly believe that PLINQO is the best ORM available, period. PLINQO provides an extremely light-weight, fast and RAD experience. PLINQO makes working with data just plain fun. When you think success, think PLINQO, my friends.

Shouldn't I be using Entity Framework?

No, you should be using PLINQO for Entity Framework. As for vanilla Entity Framework...

When we looked into Entity Framework, we found it to be bloated, complex and seemingly designed for large, ugly, enterprise databases where entities don't remotely match the storage schema. (FYI: If you have one these suckers, good luck with that.)

If you require a 2nd opinion, look here, here and here. Hmm here, here and here. Oh wait, don't forget about the petition signed by 750+ people.

How exactly did Microsoft end up with two ORMs?

The Data Programmability Team never owned LINQ to SQL, it was owned by the C# team. It appears that it was slightly political that we have two O/R mappers and we think this is apparent in the design of the two frameworks. LINQ to SQL is more of an object API and much more natural to discover functionality. This is a major reason it is easier to use, learn and understand.

Didn't Microsoft say LINQ to SQL was dead?

No, Microsoft has never said that LINQ to SQL is dead, and improvements are being made according to Damien Guard's LINQ to SQL 4.0 feature list.

Microsoft also released the following statement about their plan to continue support for LINQ to SQL:

Question #3: Where does Microsoft stand on LINQ to SQL?

Answer: We would like to be very transparent with our customers about our intentions for future innovation with respect to LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework.

In .NET 4.0, we continue to invest in both technologies. Within LINQ to SQL, we made a number of performance and usability enhancements, as well as updates to the class designer and code generation. Within the Entity Framework, we listened to a great deal to customer feedback and responded with significant investments including better foreign key support, T4 code generation, and POCO support.

Moving forward, Microsoft is committing to supporting both technologies as important parts of the .NET Framework, adding new features that meet customer requirements. We do, however, expect that the bulk of our overall investment will be in the Entity Framework, as this framework is built around the Entity Data Model (EDM). EDM represents a key strategic direction for Microsoft that spans many of our products, including SQL Server, .NET, and Visual Studio. EDM-based tools, languages and frameworks are important technologies that enable our customers and partners to increase productivity across the development lifecycle and enable better integration across applications and data sources.

Don't you like money?

PLINQO cuts down development time making applications easier to build, use and maintain. PLINQO is refactor-friendly allowing you to make changes, regenerate and you're good to go. The only real thing Entity Framework has going for it is that it supports databases other than SQL Server. If you use SQL Server and have no plans to switch to another database, do you really care about this "advantage"?

Is what they say true? Is PLINQO the fastest ORM in the world?

Well, fastest in the world may not be proven... yet. But, it's pretty dang fast.

Many tests have proven that LINQ to SQL is faster and generates more efficient SQL than Entity Framework. Entity Framework generates database agnostic eSQL which will then be translated to T-SQL or another database vendor's flavor automatically while LINQ to SQL skips this intermediate step and generates T-SQL. This is largely why LINQ to SQL generates more optimized queries. This performance test points out that LINQ to SQL's lightweight RAD approach is a much leaner, faster way to get your data back from SQL Server. Another set of tests comparing start up times between LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework showed that LINQ to SQL initializes and instantiates much faster than Entity Framework as well.

Now that we have established that LINQ to SQL is fast by itself. Let's talk about PLINQO's performance enhancements. Batch updates, batch queries, batch deletes, query caching, longer lasting enjoyment, multiple result sets... need I go on?. If high performing applications is something you desire (we haven't met anyone with a goal of slowing their application down), PLINQO again looks like the obvious choice.

What about NHibernate?

We got you covered there too: PLINQO for NHibernate