DataAccess vs Entity Framwork

[Marko Gluhak]

Hi,

 I'm long time Telerik user and DataAccess was with ASP.NET web controls only reason for my subscription. As od 2015.2 DataAccess does not have visual designer and its said that EF7 will also support only code first.

Having those facts, I'm interesting in what is now reason for keeping us to stick with DataAccess and not to change to EF as main tool for that decision in Telerik favour is out of picture. I'm not judging, just asking if anyone can point what is better now comparing DataAccess 2015.3 and EF6. From my point EF has more advantages now as its Microsoft default ORM (new project template come including EF6 in VS), NuGet has many packages depending on EF and now when Technical Support is also announced to be over in a year and become opened to public and forum support, I really dont see anything that is on side of Telerik?

Please give  your opinions to help (many of) us decide what to use in future projects.

With regards,
Marko

[Musashi]

I'm still researching this myself, but so far, the big thing, at least for me, that Telerik has that EF doesn't is the runtime mapping capabilities. Being able to define mappings at runtime is a big deal to the project I'm working on.
ex. At compile time, I know the general database schema so I code for that. But customers can add custom columns to tables. Being able to access those custom columns at runtime in a more or less native way is super SUPER handy.

[Doroteya]

Hello Marko and Musashi,

What makes Data Access different as a product are its runtime features.

Above all, using Data Access will bring to you a few unique features that are not present in Entity Framework. These are the support of database server engines different than Microsoft SQL Server (you can find the complete list here), and the Artificial API, which allows you to consume persistent types created during the runtime of your application (Telerik Sitefinity consumes Data Access like this). 

Additionally, Data Access offers a very strong LINQ implementation, and LINQ like Bulk Update\Delete functionality, which can ease your work with the data in the database. 

In web scenarios, it offers the Level 2 Cache feature, which can dramatically improve the performance of your application. On the subject of performance, our Profiler and Tuning Advisor will help you monitor it during either development or runtime. Furthermore, it detects potential problems like long running queries and displays warnings about them. 

Data Access also distributes a number of handy APIs. For example, in case your application needs to play videos, through the data access layer, you could use our Streaming API.  Our Fluent Mapping API supports backend independent mapping, which will allow you to connect to more than one db engine with the same model. If you prefer to consume stored procedures and db functions instead of LINQ, you could use our Low Level API.

In case you are interested, you could take a more high-level overview in this blog post as well.

 

I hope this helps. Let us know, if you need further information or assistance.


Regards,
Doroteya
Telerik