Entity Framework vs LINQ to SQL

Question

Now that  NET v3 5 SP1 has been released  along with VS2008 SP1   we now have access to the  NET entity framework   My question is this   When trying to decide between using the Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL as an ORM  what s the difference   The way I understand it  the Entity Framework  when used with LINQ to Entities  is a  big brother  to LINQ to SQL   If this is the case - what advantages does it have   What can it do that LINQ to SQL can t do on its own

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LINQ to SQL   Homogeneous datasource  SQL Server Recommended for small projects only where data structure is well designed Mapping can be changed without recompilling with SqlMetal exe  dbml  Database Markup Language  One-to-one mapping between tables and classes Supports TPH inheritance Doesn t support complex types Storage-first approach Database-centric view of a database Created by C  team Supported but not further improvements intended   Entity Framework   Heterogeneus datasource  Support many data providers Recommended for all new projects except   small ones  LINQ to SQL  when data source is a flat file  ADO NET   Mapping can be changed without recompilling when setting model and mapping files Metadata Artifact Process to Copy To Output Directory  edmx  Entity Data Model  which contains   SSDL  Storage Schema Definition Language  CSDL  Conceptual Schema Definition Language  MSL  Mapping Specification Language   One-to-one  one-to-many  many-to-one mappings between tables and classes Supports inheritence   TPH  Table Per Hierarchy  TPT  Table Per Type  TPC  Table Per Concrete Class   Supports complex types Code-first  Model-first  Storage-first approaches Application-centric view of a database Created by SQL Server team Future of Microsoft Data APIs     See also    LINQ To SQL Vs Entity Framework Difference between LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework Entity Framework vs LINQ TO SQL

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My experience with Entity Framework has been less than stellar   First  you have to inherit from the EF base classes  so say good bye to POCOs   Your design will have to be around the EF   With LinqtoSQL I could use my existing business objects   Additionally  there is no lazy loading  you have to implement that yourself   There are some work arounds out there to use POCOs and lazy loading  but they exist IMHO because EF isn t ready yet   I plan to come back to it after 4 0

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I think if you need to develop something quick with no Strange things in the middle  and you need the facility to have entities representing your tables   Linq2Sql can be a good allied  using it with LinQ unleashes a great developing timing

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The answers here have covered many of the differences between Linq2Sql and EF  but there s a key point which has not been given much attention  Linq2Sql only supports SQL Server whereas EF has providers for the following RDBMS s   Provided by Microsoft    ADO NET drivers for SQL Server  OBDC and OLE DB   Via third party providers    MySQL Oracle DB2 VistaDB SQLite PostgreSQL Informix U2 Sybase Synergex Firebird Npgsql   to name a few   This makes EF a powerful programming abstraction over your relational data store  meaning developers have a consistent programming model to work with regardless of the underlying data store  This could be very useful in situations where you are developing a product that you want to ensure will interoperate with a wide range of common RDBMS s   Another situation where that abstraction is useful is where you are part of a development team that works with a number of different customers  or different business units within an organisation  and you want to improve developer productivity by reducing the number of RDBMS s they have to become familiar with in order to support a range of different applications on top of different RDBMS s

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I think the quick and dirty answer is that   LINQ to SQL is the quick-and-easy way to do it   This means you will get going quicker  and deliver quicker if you are working on something smaller  Entity Framework is the all-out  no-holds-barred way to do it   This means you will take more time up-front  develop slower  and have more flexibility if you are working on something larger

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I found a very good answer here which explains when to use what in simple words   The basic rule of thumb for which framework to use is how to plan on editing your data in your presentation layer   Linq-To-Sql - use this framework if you plan on editing a one-to-one relationship of your data in your presentation layer   Meaning you don t plan on combining data from more than one table in any one view or page   Entity Framework - use this framework if you plan on combining data from more than one table in your view or page  To make this clearer  the above terms are specific to data that will be manipulated in your view or page  not just displayed   This is important to understand    With the Entity Framework you are able to  quot merge quot  tabled data together to present to the presentation layer in an editable form  and then when that form is submitted  EF will know how to update ALL the data from the various tables  There are probably more accurate reasons to choose EF over L2S  but this would probably be the easiest one to understand   L2S does not have the capability to merge data for view presentation

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My impression is that your database is pretty enourmous or very badly designed if Linq2Sql does not fit your needs  I have around 10 websites both larger and smaller all using Linq2Sql  I have looked and Entity framework many times but I cannot find a good reason for using it over Linq2Sql  That said I try to use my databases as model so I already have a 1 to 1 mapping between model and database    At my current job we have a database with 200  tables  An old database with lots of bad solutions so there I could see the benefit of Entity Framework over Linq2Sql but still I would prefer to redesign the database since the database is the engine of the application and if the database is badly designed and slow then my application will also be slow  Using Entity framework on such a database seems like a quickfix to disguise the bad model but it could never disguise the bad performance you get from such a database

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Neither yet supports the unique SQL 2008 datatypes  The difference from my perspective is that Entity still has a chance to construct a model around my geographic datatype in some future release  and Linq to SQL  being abandoned  never will   Wonder what s up with nHibernate  or OpenAccess

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Here s some metrics guys     QUANTIFYING THINGS      I took this query where I was using Entity Framework var result    from metattachType in  dbContext METATTACH TYPE                 join lineItemMetattachType in  dbContext LINE ITEM METATTACH TYPE on metattachType ID equals lineItemMetattachType METATTACH TYPE ID                 where  lineItemMetattachType LINE ITEM ID    lineItemId  amp  amp  lineItemMetattachType IS DELETED    false                  amp  amp  metattachType IS DELETED    false                  select new MetattachTypeDto                                         Id   metattachType ID                      Name   metattachType NAME                    ToList     and changed it into this where I m using the repository pattern Linq             return await  attachmentTypeRepository GetAll   Where x   gt   x IsDeleted                   Join  lineItemAttachmentTypeRepository GetAll   Where x   gt  x LineItemId    lineItemId  amp  amp   x IsDeleted                   attachmentType   gt  attachmentType Id                  lineItemAttachmentType   gt  lineItemAttachmentType MetattachTypeId                   attachmentType  lineItemAttachmentType    gt  new AttachmentTypeDto                                       Id   attachmentType Id                      Name   attachmentType Name                    ToListAsync   ConfigureAwait false    Linq-to-sql             return  from attachmentType in  attachmentTypeRepository GetAll                       join lineItemAttachmentType in  lineItemAttachmentTypeRepository GetAll   on attachmentType Id equals lineItemAttachmentType MetattachTypeId                     where  lineItemAttachmentType LineItemId    lineItemId  amp  amp   lineItemAttachmentType IsDeleted  amp  amp   attachmentType IsDeleted                      select new AttachmentTypeDto                                                 Id   attachmentType Id                          Name   attachmentType Name                        ToList     Also  please know that Linq-to-Sql is 14x faster than Linq

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Is LINQ to SQL Truly Dead  by Jonathan Allen for InfoQ com  Matt Warren describes  LINQ to SQL  as something that  quot was never even supposed to exist  quot  Essentially  it was just supposed to be stand-in to help them develop LINQ until the real ORM was ready      The scale of Entity Framework caused it to miss the  NET 3 5 Visual Studio 2008 deadline  It was completed in time for the unfortunately named  quot  NET 3 5 Service Pack 1 quot   which was more like a major release than a service pack      Developers do not like  ADO NET Entity Framework  because of the complexity      as of  NET 4 0  LINQ to Entities will be the recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios

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There are a number of obvious differences outlined in that article  lars posted  but short answer is    L2S is tightly coupled - object property to specific field of database or more correctly object mapping to a specific database schema L2S will only work with SQL Server  as far as I know  EF allows mapping a single class to multiple tables  EF will handle M-M relationships EF will have ability to target any ADO NET data provider   The original premise was L2S is for Rapid Development  and EF for more  enterprisey  n-tier applications  but that is selling L2S a little short

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I found that I couldn t use multiple databases within the same database model when using EF  But in linq2sql I could just by prefixing the schema names with database names    This was one of the reasons I originally began working with linq2sql  I do not know if EF has yet allowed this functionality  but I remember reading that it was intended for it not to allow this

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You can find a good comparision here     http   www dotnet-tricks com Tutorial entityframework 1M5W300314-Difference-between-LINQ-to-SQL-and-Entity-Framework html  http   www c-sharpcorner com blogs entity-framework-vs-linq-to-sql1

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If your database is straightforward and simple  LINQ to SQL will do  If you need logical abstracted entities on top of your tables  then go for Entity Framework

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I am working for  customer that has a big project that is using Linq-to-SQL  When the project started it was the obvious choice  because Entity Framework was lacking some major features at that time and performance of Linq-to-SQL was much better   Now EF has evolved and Linq-to-SQL is lacking async support  which is great for highly scalable services  We have 100  requests per second sometimes and despite we have optimized our databases  most queries still take several milliseconds to complete  Because of the synchronous database calls  the thread is blocked and not available for other requests   We are thinking to switch to Entity Framework  solely for this feature  It s a shame that Microsoft didn t implement async support into Linq-to-SQL  or open-sourced it  so the community could do it    Addendum December 2018  Microsoft is moving towards  NET Core and Linq-2-SQL isn t support on  NET Core  so you need to move to EF to make sure you can migrate to EF Core in the future   There are also some other options to consider  such as LLBLGen  It s a mature ORM solution that exists already a long time and has been proven more future-proof then the MS data solutions  ODBC  ADO  ADO NET  Linq-2-SQL  EF  EF core

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Linq-to-SQL   It is provider it supports SQL Server only  It s a mapping technology to map SQL Server database tables to  NET objects  Is Microsoft s first attempt at an ORM - Object-Relational Mapper      Linq-to-Entities   Is the same idea  but using Entity Framework in the background  as the ORM - again from Microsoft  It supporting multiple database main advantage of entity framework is developer can work on any database no need to learn syntax to perform any operation on different different databases     According to my personal experience Ef is better  if you have no idea about SQL    performance in LINQ is little bit faster as compare to EF reason LINQ language written in lambda

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LINQ to SQL only supports 1 to 1 mapping of database tables  views  sprocs and functions available in Microsoft SQL Server   It s a great API to use for quick data access construction to relatively well designed SQL Server databases   LINQ2SQL was first released with C  3 0 and  Net Framework 3 5   LINQ to Entities  ADO Net Entity Framework  is an ORM  Object Relational Mapper  API which allows for a broad definition of object domain models and their relationships to many different ADO Net data providers   As such  you can mix and match a number of different database vendors  application servers or protocols to design an aggregated mash-up of objects which are constructed from a variety of tables  sources  services  etc   ADO Net Framework was released with the  Net Framework 3 5 SP1   This is a good introductory article on MSDN  Introducing LINQ to Relational Data

[.net] Entity Framework vs LINQ to SQL

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