ORMs and the DBA: How to Make Both Happy

DBAs lose sleep over ORMs touching their databases. Developers lose sleep thinking about using stored procedures. Is there a middle ground? Yes! I’ll introduce techniques and tools in .NET that let developers use ORMs while keeping the DBA happy. Talk to any DBA about ORMs and you’ll quickly find out all the things you like about ORMs are what DBAs don’t like. Interestingly enough, most developers I’ve talked to have issues with their ORMs, too. In this session, we’ll explore why ORMs cause such trouble using examples of bad behavior and poor performance with common application patterns. I’ll outline some strategies for mitigating those troubles such as making sure to audit the generated SQL and changing how we write application code to take advantage of how ORMs attack problems under the hood. Lastly, I’ll introduce some tools (and even yet another ORM) that help solve some of the worst of the problems we see in the database when using ORMs.