LINQ to SQL vs. NHibernate

To be honest, I have to say that my next project will use NHibernate for its persistence technology instead of LINQ to SQL. Why? It is a large project, with a significant number of entities, and we want to support fine-grained object models and table per sub-class mapping strategies. We also wanted the insurance of being able eager fetch on a query-by-query basis and have a 2nd level cache. It is an old adage but 'there is no silver bullet'. I'm picking one tool out of the kit, it does not mean the others are not valuable.

At the same time LINQ to SQL still forms part of our strategy, because we believe it to be simpler to approach for many projects.So we also have and will be using LINQ to SQL. If anything LINQ to SQL replaces WORM for us which we used for a number of projects where we had good table to entity affinity. Ironically perhaps WORM was an implementation of the proposed interface for ObjectSpaces. ObjectSpaces was the MS ORM for .NET 2.0, that never saw the light of day. ObjectSpaces became LINQ to SQL, and Matt has full the story here, so it seems a natural inheritor. Let us hope it does not meet the ObjectSpaces fate of being sidelined for a more grandiose vision of data access.

A valid question might be to ask why I want improve LINQ to SQL, why I do not just tell everyone to use NHibernate. Some of this is a recognition of the market, many people will not use a non-MS ORM and LINQ to SQL is is a solid ORM. Pragmatically we are likely to get more .NET developers who know LINQ to SQL available in the market place than NHibernate developers. But I also believe that with the expressiveness of LINQ MS have a real chance to move the ORM market forward in the .NET space. LINQ to SQL is like ASP.NET MVC, it is a welcome acknowledgement from MS of what developers want, and we should commend them when they do get it right.

I will be posting a series on NHibernate going forward, so that you can make your own judgements on which to use and when.

from http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/archive/2008/07/01/architecting-linq-to-sql-part-10.aspx