Hi there,

NHibernate does help a lot. Persistence is the key feature it has. n wats gud about NHibernate is that its flexible and if there is a change in ur database schema its does accomodate changes very well.

Scalability and performance could be an issue that u shud consider.

I am also looking out for some best samples and documentation stuff available for NHibernate.
n if anyone please let me know industry adopted best practices for NHibernate.

Waiting for ur replies.

Thank you very much u al.

In all honesty I think the "Achilles heel" of NHibernate is that the developers using it have to know what they are doing. NHibernate is a great tool, but if you abuse it, its possible to cause performance or scalability problems. But the tool itself scales and performs really well.

People like to claim NHibernate is a performance problem because they don't know much about it. But to them every level of abstraction is a performance problem. While it is probably true that you could hand optimize everything and achieve better performance without NHibernate it would take a very long time, most people won't do it, and many people aren't even capable of doing it. NHibernate often provides better performance than what you would see out of your standard .NET approach with stored procedures. (That is when things get complicated).

I agree with jchapman. If your applications need to be performant or work with large amounts of data, you won't get around using SQL Profiler and some other tools for verifying that NHibernate is doing what you want it to do.

That said, even without NHibernate you would not get around doing quite a lot of optimizations like optimizing queries, putting indexes into your DB and other things.

But then, usually you only need to do optimizations for comparably few select queries and tables, which are highly transactional. From my experience NH provides a whole bunch of optimization techniques that you can apply in those select cases such as lazy/eager loading, different fetch types, different caching options, support for storted procs and the like.

For the rest of your app that only requires non-critical persistence, NH works great out of the box and facilitates the development of business logic a lot.

Hope this helps, Christoph