We have an upcoming project in my group that is going to need to be very, very performant. This project will involve us querying for data from a SQL database, transforming that data into strongly-typed objects, then returning those objects to the calling system through a service layer. Eventually, this service will be a central pillar in our organization’s service-oriented architecture (SOA), and as such it absolutely has to be fast.

We generally want to use Entity Framework for our ORM, but just a little searching reveals StackExchange questions and blog post after blog post detailing how EF is simply not up to par for high-performance systems. Into that gap steps so-called “micro-ORMs” like Dapper.NET (which is used on the StackExchange family of sites including StackOverflow) which promise performance at the cost of maintainability. As always, we also have the option of using straight ADO.NET queries.

#entity framework