Advantages and Disadvantages of Entity Framework

Entity Framework is an ORM tools. It is good for data accessing. It provides lot of benefits. But for the development of enterprise applications we should consider its performance. This article describes about the benefits of entity framework and limitations of entity framework. Summery of the article:

• Advantages of Entity Framework
• Disadvantages of Entity Framework

Advantages of Entity Framework
The advantages of EF are given bellow:

• It provides auto generated code
• It reduce development time
• It reduce development cost
• It enables developers to visually design models and mapping of database
• It provides capability of programming a conceptual model.
• It provides unique syntax (LINQ / Yoda) for all object queries whether it is database or not
• It allow multiple conceptual models to mapped to a single storage schema
• It’s easy to map business objects (with drag & drop tables).

Disadvantages of Entity Framework
The disadvantages of EF are given bellow:

• Lazy loading is the main drawbacks of EF
• Its syntax is complicated
• Its logical schema is not able to understand business entities and relation among each other
• Logical schema of database is not capable of using certain parts of application
• It is not available for every RDMS
• Need to handle data in nontraditional way
• It does not work if we change any schema of the database. We need to update the schema on the solution.
• It is not good for huge domain model.

All in all we can say entity frameworks are good for small range of applications. But if we overcome the drawbacks of EF it will be perfect for any type of applications.