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Where is the point in coercing the ORM into doing what you want it to do? Without proper documentation?
Dear ORM, the database we are stuck with is not well designed. Deal with it. While we are at it, please stop hogging memory. I know that there is an unbuffered database context, but why does it not have the methods I need to get the bigger chunks of data?
In the end it was easier to do it the oldschool way than to beat NHibernate into submission.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: Where is the point in coercing the ORM into doing what you want it to do
There is none, but that's a decision to take from case to case.
And to make an informed decision you need to be informed to start with...
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Exactly, but that does still not help if you work for someone who comes up with a few minor changes every five minutes.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Nothing helps against that
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The first victim after making contact with the enemy always is the plan. 
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I'm 46, so I am on my way to being an old fart myself; hell, my kids already think I am an old fart.
I know SQL extremely well, and I know Entity Framework extremely well - I am proficient in both. They are tools, and when used properly, they do their job extremely well.
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I'm curious -- are you doing anything with the database other than presenting it to the UI so the user can CRUD the data? As in, do you have actually have any business logic that actually does something internally with the data?
Latest Article - Contextual Data Explorer
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Not so much business logic I think, but lots of logging data and presenting that in reports and charts to the user. In the past this application already had performance problems due to the massive number of queries, we switched from SQL Server to PostgreSQL for that reason.
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Marc Clifton wrote: do you have actually have any business logic that actually does something internally with the data?
Indeed - and where is this business logic implemented ? If it is implemented in stored procedures (so all types of clients will have the same logic enforced), and you use views to decouple the clients from database dependencies and control client access, and you run an Oracle database - beware of the ORM.
I sat on the sideline and watched a developer attempt to create a mostly auto-generated NHibernate-based C# WPF application against such an Oracle database. The schedule slipped again and again, and when the application was released it was a memory-hog, slow, and really hard to maintain. We already had a prototype non-ORM application written in a few days - but someone wanted a WPF app.
But I can imagine that if you are interfacing directly to "dumb" tables with no server-side logic applied then I guess the situation will be different. Oh, and if your database is SQL Server - at least the developer in question never got Visual Studio to interpret the Oracle view layer correctly.
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Slacker may have the right of it, most of us old farts despise ORM products probably because we have all rolled our own which we therefore know inside out and most of the ORMs are way too complex.
I inherited ClassBuilder from a senior developer in the 90s, written in VB5, the current version (in c#) is basically the same. It does a hell of a lot less than commercial ORMS and it does a hell of a lot more of what I use every day.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Slacker may have the right of it, most of us old farts despise ORM products
Don't forget that the ORM crowd still need their programming training wheels; they learn how to do bare metal SQL coding when they get their "big boy pants" 
This space for rent
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I've been writing SQL for over 15 years now. I am extremely proficient in SQL as well as the latest ORM stuff. So, when do I get my big boy pants?
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Ok then, here you go: [Pants] 
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Nice! I'm finally moving up in the world. 
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Use ORM's to broaden your development skills and advance your career. But don't expect to be more productive in all scenarios (sometimes the opposite happens).
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From a maintenance perspective using ORM relieves the developers from
maintaining at the database level. You could develop all your core
and business logic in code and cover all the test cases and have the
need not to debug at the database level.It would be a good choice.
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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My advice would be to use an ORM (probably EF even though faster ones do exist) but keep a close eye on what the ORM is doing and learn how to performance tune it - in particular when not to use lazy loading.
( This is based on the economics of developer time being staggeringly expensive and hardware spectacularly cheap - if that does not apply in your situation then adjust accordingly. )
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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: in particular when not to use lazy loading.
Hear hear
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Twenty tables, why bother?
Sounds like changing for the sake of changing.
If it was a new project, and mostly CRUD I'd go EF. Otherwise I'd handcrank it or use a lightweight micro-ORM.
If performance is an issue of any kind whatsoever, don't do NHibernate.
Here's[^] some benchmarks by Frans Bouma (of llblgen).
Here's[^] an updated version the code he used.
Take a look at the code and test for yourself.
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Thanks for the links ! My worst fears in regard to performance are confirmed, as NHibernate seems to be the ORM that performs the worst in Frans Bouma's test.
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It is indeed.
But you need to keep in mind that it is largely due to how the test is setup. Loading a large amount of data into a collection.
That's not where EF or NHibernate excels. They are both defaulting to lazy loading the data. So if you mainly do CRUD you might not even notice that it's slower.
I might add that my own mapper is even faster, but that's not an ORM.
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That specific test you can simply throw into the garbage.
You really can't compare cached data with raw.
And if he gets raw ado to be slower than any ORM, he doesn't know what he's doing. (most probably implicit conversions, GetValue instead of using the type specific Get, and using named Get instead of ordinal Get)
Which he on the other hand has in common with a lot of people. 
A quick check of the code confirms my suspicions.
He returns datasets in his own homegrown "datalayer" that doesn't do anything the right way. 
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So I tested his code (with a different database though) and compared with my own (creating POCOs instead of a dataset) and it becomes a bit more than twice as fast, which is also the speed indicated by dapper.
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Thanks, you really seem to enjoy this
But I'm afraid management has decided to go on with NHibernate, not my decision of course.
We will see how far we get with it ... 
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