Compare and Contrast NHibernate and OpenAccess from Telerik

Question

Have you used the OpenAccess ORM from Telerik? How does it compare to NHibernate? When should I consider using it over NHibernate?

Answer 1

I'm wondering the same thing myself. On one hand, there's NH with its free, open-source self, but with limited support options. On the other, a fairly new addition to a well-known tool provider's box, OA.

OA costs money, but you get support. NH is free, but support has been known at least in my brief experience to be limited and slow in coming.

I think both are likely fine products. I've decided to give OA a try since I am already a user of Telerik's tools. OA and its support are being paid for anyway.

NH uses plain classes and object with no decorations on the class properties whatsoever. OA requires decorations (nicely generated by the OA Visual Studio GUI).

NH requires a "session" in which to do a unit of work with the database; OA calls it "scope". Both use "transaction".

OA has integration with Visual Studio and can both forward- and reverse-map to and from a database. Forward mapping is so you can design your classes and then "push" those into the database for persistence. The "reverse" is for you "domain model" developers which is what I prefer.

OA is definitely undergoing some major updates as Telerik plays "catch up" per its recent acquisition and release of OpenAccess, formerly owned by Vanatec (out of Germany).

As far as an "ease of use" and "performance / scalability" standpoint, I wish I knew where each stood. I'm sure someone out there could put together an honest test between the two and make those determinations.

One thing I like about NH is the available templates to generate the needed code not just for the "dumb" business objects (which is all OA generates now), but for a BLL and DLL. After much conversation with Telerik, I have the impression they plan for more code-generating options so OA is more useful out of the box.

Hope this helps! Someone please try to get some stats on the performance issues.