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Scenarios for O/R Mapping in .NET
There are a couple of different ways that you might want to incorporate an O/R Mapper or code generator into your software.
Although it's impossible to explore every possibility, this section of the Guide offers some general guidance to common scenarios.
Data Access Layer Components
Data Access Layer Components could be said to be the main target for O/R Mappers. Multi-DBMS support is important here, as your application might need to support more than one database as the storage mechanism. Support for transactions, null values, caching, stored procedures, SQL Logging, data-binding, and an OO-Query syntax are all considerations when using an O/R Mapper for a data access layer component.
Generating CRUD Code
CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) code can be time consuming to write by hand. This process is also prone to errors, the likeliness of which increases with the more entities you have in your database. Using scripts or templates, code generators can help you automatically generate all of the code required to perform CRUD operations against your database in an object-oriented fashion. By repeating this process after any changes are made to your database schema, you can use a code generator to greatly reduce the amount of time required to maintain the synchronization between your object model and your data model.