Times ago I blogged about micro ORM-s. I have been busy through all Covid-19 times learning technical side of DDD and during that I met again my old friend Dapper. There are applications where Dapper is used to query read-only data without overhead coming with ORM-s. Also there are simple applications where for one or another reason developers decided to keep as close to raw SQL as possible. This blog post is brief introduction to Dapper anbd how to use it in ASP.NET Core applications.
What is Micro-ORM?
Micro-ORMs are lightweight object-relational mappers (ORM). They have thin communication interface that makes it easy to query objects from database and – in some cases – to get them easily back to database too. Micro-ORMs doesn’t generate SQL based on object queries like full-blown ORM-s do. Also they usually don’t have change tracking and any other advanced features. As SQL is not generated for us we have to write it manually.
Manually written SQL and lack of powerful features of full-blown ORM-s means one thing – querying of database is easy task to do but updating of object graphs can be challenging.
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