ServiceStack.OrmLite is a convention-based, configuration-free lightweight ORM that uses standard POCO classes and Data Annotation attributes to infer its table schema.
Fast, Simple, Typed ORM for .NET
OrmLite provides a convenient, DRY, config-free, RDBMS-agnostic typed wrapper that retains a high affinity with SQL, exposing intuitive APIs that generate predictable SQL and maps cleanly to (DTO-friendly) disconnected POCO's. This approach makes easier to reason-about your data access making it obvious what SQL is getting executed at what time, whilst mitigating unexpected behavior, implicit N+1 queries and leaky data access prevalent in Heavy ORMs.
OrmLite was designed with a focus on the core objectives:
- Provide a set of light-weight C# extension methods around .NET's impl-agnostic
System.Data.*interfaces - Map a POCO class 1:1 to an RDBMS table, cleanly by conventions, without any attributes required.
- Create/Drop DB Table schemas using nothing but POCO class definitions (IOTW a true code-first ORM)
- Simplicity - typed, wrist friendly API for common data access patterns.
- High performance - with support for indexes, text blobs, etc.
- Amongst the fastest Micro ORMs for .NET.
- Expressive power and flexibility - with access to IDbCommand and raw SQL
- Cross platform - supports multiple dbs (currently: Sql Server, Sqlite, MySql, PostgreSQL, Firebird) running on both .NET and Mono platforms.
In OrmLite: 1 Class = 1 Table. There should be no surprising or hidden behaviour, the Typed API that produces the Query doesn't impact how results get intuitively mapped to the returned POCO's which could be different to the POCO used to create the query, e.g. containing only a subset of the fields you want populated.
Any non-scalar properties (i.e. complex types) are text blobbed by default in a schema-less text field using any of the available pluggable text serializers. Support for POCO-friendly references is also available to provide a convenient API to persist related models. Effectively this allows you to create a table from any POCO type and it should persist as expected in a DB Table with columns for each of the classes 1st level public properties.
