This is why I love Dapper micro-ORM in the .NET world. It gives you the best of both worlds. You are still close to SQL, but you get objects back. Started by S

This is why I love Dapper micro-ORM in the .NET world. It gives you the best of both worlds. You are still close to SQL, but you get objects back. Started by Sam Saffron (StackOverflow) and used by StackOverflow themselves, it is fast, well written, concise and easy to use. Basic usage: IEnumerable<Account> resultList = conn.Query<Account>(@" SELECT * FROM Account WHERE shopId = @ShopId", new { ShopId = shopId }); Performance of SELECT mapping over 500 iterations - POCO serialization: Hand coded (using a SqlDataReader) 47ms Dapper ExecuteMapperQuery<Post> 49ms ServiceStack.OrmLite (QueryById) 50ms PetaPoco 52ms BLToolkit 80ms SubSonic CodingHorror 107ms NHibernate SQL 104ms Linq 2 SQL ExecuteQuery 181ms Entity framework ExecuteStoreQuery 631ms - https://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ https://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ - http://www.tritac.com/bp-24-dapper-net-by-example http://www.tritac.com/bp-24-dapper-net-by-example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dapper_ORM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dapper_ORM - http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/source/browse/Tests/PerformanceTests.cs http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/source/browse/Tests/...