Is ORM (Linq, Hibernate...) really that useful?

Question

I have been playing with some LINQ ORM (LINQ directly to SQL) and I have to admit I like its expressive powers . For small utility-like apps, It also works quite fast: dropping a SQL server on some surface and you're set to linq away.

For larger apps however, the DAL never was that big of an issue to me to setup, nor maintain, and more often than not, once it was set, all the programming was not happening there anyway...

My, honest - I am an ORM newbie - question : what is the big advantage of ORM over writing a decent DAL by hand?

(seems like a double, couldn't find it though)

UPDATE : OK its a double :-) I found it myself eventually :

ORM vs Handcoded Data Access Layer

Answer 1

• Strong-typing
• No need to write the DAL yourself => time savings
• No need to write SQL code yourself => less error-prone