Entity Framework 4 vs Native Ado.net

Question

I was wondering how does the Entity Framework 4 is compared to native Ado.Net and SPs ?

what i would be missing if i used normal Ado.Net ?

does it worth leaving EF4 ?

Answer 1

In a nutshell, EF is an object-relational mapper (ORM), and ADO.Net is raw power. An ORM allows you to trade some runtime performance for ease of maintenance. You gain the ability to write code in a more declarative manner, expressing what you want out of the database instead of exactly how to go about getting it. As a result, changes to the database structure can be accounted for in the mappings rather than in every single part of your application that needed to touch the particular table that changed.

What you would be missing if you use ADO.Net is developer productivity. Describing each database operation in detail to ADO.Net is time consuming, error-prone, and not much fun.

I don't think I would ever want to "leave" an ORM and go back to raw ADO.Net except in situations in which extreme performance is required, such as importing large amounts of data, in which case you might be better off writing an SSIS package anyway.

Answer 2

EF is not suited for "crunching" large amounts of data: statistical or financial data with lot of abstract entities for example. Otherwise it's fine. Anyway, unless you suffering from perfomance issues - it's fine too. Also nothing stops you from using both concepts at the same time.

Answer 3

EF feels more natural, but if you are a hardcore sql user, it might feel weak and odd at first. But I like doing everything on the c# side, less maintenance issues, less headaches, less magic strings.

Anyways, for performance issues, unless you are doing mass inserts, updates, you won't see any difference.

If you use normal ADO.Net, without some kind of OR/M wrapped around it, you would still be working on records, not classes with behaviours and methods on them. You would need an additional biz layer tied to the record.