22-25 April 2026 
ORMs and the DBA: How to Make Both Happy
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
ORMs can be the source of many database performance problems, but it does not have to be that way. Come learn how to talk to your application developers about how they should use ORMs properly and when they should not use them at all.
Session Details
DBAs lose sleep over ORMs touching their databases. Developers lose sleep thinking about using stored procedures. Is there a middle ground? Yes! I’ll introduce techniques and tools in .NET that let developers use ORMs while keeping the DBA happy.
Talk to any DBA about ORMs and you’ll quickly find out all the things you like about ORMs are what DBAs don’t like. Interestingly enough, most developers I’ve talked to have issues with their ORMs, too. In this session, we’ll explore why ORMs cause such trouble using examples of bad behavior and poor performance with common application patterns. I’ll outline some strategies for mitigating those troubles such as making sure to audit the generated SQL and changing how we write application code to take advantage of how ORMs attack problems under the hood. Lastly, I’ll introduce some tools (and even yet another ORM) that help solve some of the worst of the problems we see in the database when using ORMs.
Talk to any DBA about ORMs and you’ll quickly find out all the things you like about ORMs are what DBAs don’t like. Interestingly enough, most developers I’ve talked to have issues with their ORMs, too. In this session, we’ll explore why ORMs cause such trouble using examples of bad behavior and poor performance with common application patterns. I’ll outline some strategies for mitigating those troubles such as making sure to audit the generated SQL and changing how we write application code to take advantage of how ORMs attack problems under the hood. Lastly, I’ll introduce some tools (and even yet another ORM) that help solve some of the worst of the problems we see in the database when using ORMs.
3 things you'll get out of this session
Understand why ORMs generate the SQL they do
Learn how to modify that behavior, both for good and bad
Learn how to communicate to application developers better ways of data access