As I understand, it's ORM, but without 'mapper'. Every ORM has querying DSL, some of them are not producing objects at all. I think LINQ is that part of ORM. So

As I understand, it's ORM, but without 'mapper'. Every ORM has querying DSL, some of them are not producing objects at all. I think LINQ is that part of ORM. Some ORMs have poor querying ability: Rails, Django (more OOP approach), but some have powerful: Sequel, Sqlalchemy (more data processing approach). For example, that's Sequel querying DSL: http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/rdoc/files/doc/querying_rdoc.html http://sequel.jeremyevans.net/rdoc/files/doc/querying_rdoc.h... And I think LINQ is "language integrated" because C#, like Java, has poor DSL building possibilities. So they're added ORM-specific syntax right into language.