I'm trying to figure the best strategy about how to organize DataContexts. The typical DB we work has between 50 and 100 tables usually in third-normal form and with many relations between them. I think we have two options:
- Put all tables in a single context. This will ensure that anything we do will be committed in the correct order in database. The problem is that the LINQ designer will be a mess with 50+ tables and I'm worrying performance may be affected.
- Create several data contexts based on the logical grouping of tables. The problem is that there will be places where one side of a relation will be in one context and the other in another one. We'll have to manually take care of committing both context-s in the correct order.
Is there any recommended practice to handle this?
More details:
I want to create my own entities and unit of work on top of LINQ to SQL. Entities will be defined in a xml model file where the mapping to LINQ entities will be specified also. A custom tool will generate my entities (POCO) based on the model. The client code will interact only with my entities and my unit of work; never directly with the DataContext or LINQ entities. However I do not want to duplicate what LINQ to SQL provide out of box so I want to use the underlying LINQ DataContext. This means that I cannot have two orders in different data contexts, because it wouldn't be possible to map my POCO Order with both of them.