Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

(EDIT: I made it a community wiki as it is more suited to a collaborative format.) There are a plethora of ways to access SQL Server and other databases from .NET. All have their pros and cons and it will never be a simple question of which is "best" - the answer will always be "it depends". However, I am looking for a comparison at a high level of the different approaches and frameworks in the context of different levels of systems . For example, I would imagine that for a quick-and-dirty Web 2.0 application the answer would be very different from an in-house Enterprise-level CRUD application. I am aware that there are numerous questions on Stack Overflow dealing with subsets of this question, but I think it would be useful to try to build a summary comparison. I will endeavour to update the question with corrections and clarifications as we go. So far, this is my understanding at a high level - but I am sure it is wrong... I am primarily focusing on the Microsoft approaches to keep this focused. ADO.NET Entity Framework Database agnostic Good because it allows swapping backends in and out Bad because it can hit performance and database vendors are not too happy about it Seems to be MS's preferred route for the future Complicated to learn (though, see 267357 ) It is accessed through LINQ to Entities so provides ORM, thus allowing abstraction in your code LINQ to SQL Uncertain future (see <a href="http://www.infoq.com/news/200

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel