data-access

There seem to be very different opinions about using transactions for reading from a database. Quote from the DeveloperWorks article Transaction strategies: Models and strategies overview : Why would you need a transaction if you are only reading data? The answer is that you don't. Starting a transaction to perform a read-only operation adds to the overhead of the processing thread and can cause shared read locks on the database (depending on what type of database you are using and what the isolation level is set to). As a contrary opinion there is the following quote from Hibernate

Persistence ignorance is typically defined as the ability to persist & retrieve standard .NET objects (or POCOs if you really insist on giving them a name). And a seemingly well accepted definition of a standard .NET object is: "...ordinary classes where you focus on the business problem at hand without adding stuff for infrastructure-related reasons..." However, I see people describing NHibernate as a framework that allows persistence ignorance, and yet it is a framework that cannot work on any standard .NET object, only standard .NET objects that adhere to particular design requirements, for

Does anyone know a way to auto-generate database tables for a given class? I'm not looking for an entire persistence layer - I already have a data access solution I'm using, but I suddenly have to store a lot of information from a large number of classes and I really don't want to have to create all these tables by hand. For example, given the following class: class Foo { private string property1; public string Property1 { get { return property1; } set { property1 = value; } } private int property2; public int Property2 { get { return property2; } set { property2 = value; } } } I'd expect the