SCHOTIME.NET

As I mentioned a few posts ago, in the last couple of years I moved away from writing native SQL to a full blown ORM and back again. Well not all the way back. Here is where PetaPoco comes in.

I had been using my own SQL to Object mapper for a while before I stumbled over PetaPoco, and it had very similar ideas to mine. It has gone one step further though, with nice support for paging, inserts, updates, deletes and multiple database support.

Since forking the repository at Github, I have implemented and suggested many changes that have made it back (thanks to Brad) into the main repository. Some of these include support for Oracle (including sequences for PK), DB field to Object field name conventions (and the ability to customize these per project).

So why have I come the full circle on this.

1. Well firstly, SQL is a great query language for RDMS databases. It is very very powerful and I don’t think that it is all that difficult to learn.
2. Just give me my data. I just want to create a sql query and map it to my object so I can use it. I don’t want to have explicit mapping files/code.
3. The pain is just not worth it IMO. Why should I have to spend excess time trying to figure out if this query is going to produce a select n+1 or that I have to traverse 4 deep to get a piece of data?
4. One file. Its not 1 DLL or 10 DLLs. Its one cs file that you just drop in to your project. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
5. Performance. I just don’t have to worry that I’m losing any performance between the database and my object. If there are performance issues, its either the query or the business logic.

And those are just some of the reasons.

To see how to use the basic features of PetaPoco, please visit the PetaPoco home page.

At the moment my fork contains a few extra features that are not currently in Brad’s repository. These include multiple primary key support for legacy database, concurrency using a version column, an OnCommandExecuted extension point and a IDatabase interface. I also have the PetaPoco.cs file set to “No Dynamic” at the moment as I’m using it with .NET 3.5. To enable the dynamic object mapping support, comment out the follow line (currently line 11).

#define PETAPOCO_NO_DYNAMIC

In future blog posts I intend to go through a few examples of how I have using it and how the extension points enable you to do some pretty interesting things.

Now I know this won’t be for everyone but unless forced, I won’t be going back to a full blown ORM.

Adam