Which is beneficial for start up; Linq to SQL or Nhibernate?

Question

I want to learn ORM and I wonder which is beneficial for start up; Linq to SQL or Nhibernate. considering time,adaptation... etc

Answer 1

One important question to ask yourself is if you can accept a dependency on SQL Server. Will the database backend change to Oracle, for example? LINQ to SQL is strongly coupled to SQL Server, whereas NHibernate isn't. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad limitation, but it's important to consider.

NHibernate has really come a long way in the past few years. I really like Fluent NHibernate, for example, but that's not to say that LINQ to SQL is limiting. I love the integration with Visual Studio and it has proved itself more than capable of handling consistent load (Stack Overflow uses LINQ to SQL, for example).

Contrary to popular belief, LINQ to SQL is not dead.

Edit: Another important question to ask yourself is if you want to change the domain model. LINQ to SQL maps objects directly to tables. NHibernate, on the other hand, allows for a layer of indirection. This is also true of Entity Framework, by the way.