Remember Doctor Dobb's Journal? From the 1980s programming? Used to cover topics like fuzzy logic before they were cool?

http://www.ddj.com/database/206905004

It's a good (interesting) article on LINQ, a new feature in .NET 3.0, which helps the object relational mappings that were discussed in another thread. From what I can gather so far, LINQ is a much higher level of abstraction that lets you deal with your backing store in a more object oriented fashion.

But this is part of the reason I haven't done so much hands on with it. I'm curious if there's a place for language integrated natural queries if you're already comfortable with SQL queries and ADO.NET?

I have not yet tried LINQ, but I'm very interested in it. It look slike it could take a lot of the hard labor out of doing query type things in code. It looks like it integrates well with the new Windows Presentation Foundation as well, letting database records be bound to the UI.

I have played with this a bit and it looks great for quick mapping. I would say it is likely to fall down for things like reporting, complex mapping or situations where you need to switch backend at runtime. For a deeper solution (m$ based) look at Entity Framework - more work but far more power. Personally I think the key wotj any ORM layer to not to see as a golden hammer - make sure you can drop through the framework to ADO/ODBC/Other when you need to - you will need to.

2 cents worth - intergrated query rocks - about time - we had this in 3/4GL days - about time it came back.

v