The move towards micro ORMs
Many of us know about the apparently recent appearance of micro ORMs thanks to Rob Conery’s Massive followed by Sam Saffron’s (and Stack Overflow’s) Dapper and more. However, having read around the web it is clear that micro ORMs have existed for as long as ADO.NET, but without the publicity. Some developers don’t like their SQL taken away from them and don’t like the idea of using a heavy ORM if they can help it. So they write their own object mapper that works for them. Of course there are many advantages to using a mature fullsome ORM, it just depends on how you look at it and what’s important in your world
I’ve been resisting using LINQ to SQL / EF / NHibernate partly because I was concerned about efficiency and control but mainly because at work I’ve just not needed to change the data access layers nor have I had the opportunity to do so. I inherited a data access layer that mainly uses stored procedures and ADO.NET and there’s no need to change this. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s stable and switching to an ORM would be virtually impossible. Does a stored procedure heavy application even suit an ORM? Perhaps for reads
But at home it’s different
At home it’s different. I’m building an application that is still in it’s early stages so I can spend time experimenting with micro ORMs. From what I’ve seen so far I like them all because :
- they are closer to the metal
- the source code is right there for you to step into
- they are much faster than full ORMs
- the learning curve is much shorter
The downside is that you need to know a little SQL to make the most of them, but this excites me! SQL is already a mature ubiquitous DSL for accessing data. If you can talk this language you are at a serious advantage than if you’re relying on an ORM to generate the SQL for you. Dapper and PetaPoco both share a slight optimisation complication in that they both dynamically generate poco mapping methods for your pocos using System.Reflection.Emit.ILGenerator. I tend to skip past that bit in the source for now 
but guess what… these two are the fastest C# based micro ORMs available right now
I’ve experimented a little with Massive, Simple.Data, Dapper and PetaPoco with PetaPoco looking like my personal favourite. I’ve spent most of my experimentation time with PetaPoco so I’ll follow this post up with a list of learning curve problems I had.