If you write your queries by hand using SQL and ADO.NET, you'll get, on average, about thirty less queries per transaction than you will using NH, but there's a

If you write your queries by hand using SQL and ADO.NET, you'll get, on average, about thirty less queries per transaction than you will using NH, but there's a reason CREATE/READ/UPDATE/DELETE spells CRUD. Writing all that SQL is a pain. Plus having the schema generated automatically is nice. As an alternative to a full blown framework, I'd go with a simple object mapper, like http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/