I am currently architecting a small CRUD applicaton. Their database is a huge mess and will be changing frequently over the course of the next 6 months to a year. What would you recommend for my data layer:
1) ORM (if so, which one?)
2) Linq2Sql
3) Stored Procedures
4) Parametrized Queries
I really need a solution that will be dynamic enough (both fast and easy) where I can replace tables and add/delete columns frequently.
Note: I do not have much experience with ORM (only a little SubSonic) and generally tend to use stored procedures so maybe that would be the way to go. I would love to learn Ling2Sql or NHibernate if either would allow for the situation I’ve described above.
One key thing to be aware of here is that if the database schema is changing frequently, you want to have some level of compile time type safety. I’ve found this to be a problem with NHibernate because it uses xml mapping files so if you change something in your database schema, you don’t know until runtime that the mapping is broken.
It will also be a problem with stored procs.
Using Linq2Sql will give you the advantage of knowing where exactly your code is breaking when you change a schema at compile time. This for me, is something that would take precedence over everything else if I’m working with a frequently changing schema