[sql] Entity Framework VS LINQ to SQL VS ADO.NET with stored procedures?

How would you rate each of them in terms of:

1. Performance
2. Speed of development
3. Neat, intuitive, maintainable code
4. Flexibility
5. Overall

I like my SQL and so have always been a die-hard fan of ADO.NET and stored procedures but I recently had a play with Linq to SQL and was blown away by how quickly I was writing out my DataAccess layer and have decided to spend some time really understanding either Linq to SQL or EF... or neither?

I just want to check, that there isn't a great flaw in any of these technologies that would render my research time useless. E.g. performance is terrible, it's cool for simple apps but can only take you so far.

Update: Can you concentrate on EF VS L2S VS SPs rather than ORM VS SPs. I'm mainly interested by EF VS L2S. But am keen to have them compared against stored procs too since plain SQl is something I know a lot about.

Stored procedures:

(+)

• Great flexibility
• Full control over SQL
• The highest performance available

(-)

• Requires knowledge of SQL
• Stored procedures are out of source control
• Substantial amount of "repeating yourself" while specifying the same table and field names. The high chance of breaking the application after renaming a DB entity and missing some references to it somewhere.
• Slow development

ORM:

(+)

• Rapid development
• Data access code now under source control
• You're isolated from changes in DB. If that happens you only need to update your model/mappings in one place.

(-)

• Performance may be worse
• No or little control over SQL the ORM produces (could be inefficient or worse buggy). Might need to intervene and replace it with custom stored procedures. That will render your code messy (some LINQ in code, some SQL in code and/or in the DB out of source control).
• As any abstraction can produce "high-level" developers having no idea how it works under the hood

The general tradeoff is between having a great flexibility and losing lots of time vs. being restricted in what you can do but having it done very quickly.

There is no general answer to this question. It's a matter of holy wars. Also depends on a project at hand and your needs. Pick up what works best for you.

There is a whole new approach that you may want to consider if what you're after is the power and performance of stored procedures, and the rapid development that tools like Entity Framework provide.

I've taken SQL+ for a test drive on a small project, and it is really something special. You basically add what amounts to comments to your SQL routines, and those comments provide instructions to a code generator, which then builds a really nice object oriented class library based on the actual SQL routine. Kind of like entity framework in reverse.

Input parameters become part of an input object, output parameters and result sets become part of an output object, and a service component provides the method calls.

If you want to use stored procedures, but still want rapid development, you might want to have a look at this stuff.

LINQ-to-SQL is a remarkable piece of technology that is very simple to use, and by and large generates very good queries to the back end. LINQ-to-EF was slated to supplant it, but historically has been extremely clunky to use and generated far inferior SQL. I don't know the current state of affairs, but Microsoft promised to migrate all the goodness of L2S into L2EF, so maybe it's all better now.

Personally, I have a passionate dislike of ORM tools (see my diatribe here for the details), and so I see no reason to favour L2EF, since L2S gives me all I ever expect to need from a data access layer. In fact, I even think that L2S features such as hand-crafted mappings and inheritance modeling add completely unnecessary complexity. But that's just me. ;-)

your question is basically O/RM's vs hand writing SQL

Using an ORM or plain SQL?

Take a look at some of the other O/RM solutions out there, L2S isn't the only one (NHibernate, ActiveRecord)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_object-relational_mapping_software

to address the specific questions:

1. Depends on the quality of the O/RM solution, L2S is pretty good at generating SQL
2. This is normally much faster using an O/RM once you grok the process
3. Code is also usually much neater and more maintainable
4. Straight SQL will of course get you more flexibility, but most O/RM's can do all but the most complicated queries
5. Overall I would suggest going with an O/RM, the flexibility loss is negligable