Is Telerik openaccess ORM worth learning?

Question

I have just won 1 Telerik Premium Collection for .NET Developer with subscription (lucky me!) and was wondering whether the OpenAccess ORM is worth learning? Has anyone thrown away their open source variant and are now using the Telerik ORM tools instead?

Are there any benefits from using the Telerik ORM tools instead of an open source variant?

Any thought suggestions?

BTW I can't wait to start using their RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX!!

Answer 1

I'm a happy telerik customer for more than 5 years. I used their ORM only in one solution and never used an open source ORM.

Throw away the existing one? NO - if you have no problems and the thing does what it should do I wouldn't change. That has nothing to do with quality or other aspects of telerik ORM. It's just a matter of fact that using a new product means to learn new things, solve some solved things again in a different way and so on.

BUT - if you have problems (or must make compromises) with your current product it's sure worth to give it a try.

Without knowing other ORMs I have one clear point why I would try telerik ORM. It's their (telerik's) outstanding support. None of my other vendors offers / does what telerik does. Simply take a look at their forums http://www.telerik.com/community/forums.aspx and you'll see what I mean.

You have a problem - they solve it; and that with very fast response times.

And that's a point you should think about when making a decision about ORM (or any other kind of product).

Answer 2

This is an older post, but I thought I would weigh in.

We recently started using Telerik's SiteFinity product for a client website. It is a very good, developer-oriented tool for creating a web content system without the size or expense of SharePoint or something similar.

We also went with a Cloud solution as Telerik's ORM supports Azure, so thus so does SiteFinity - which uses OpenAccess (ORM) to communicate with its database.

I was very impressed with the speed and flexibility of it all, being my first Cloud (Azure) development project. Telerik's customer support and personal attention is beyond reproach. I have been using Telerik products for years and was not surprised how well it worked.

Two days before the site was to go live everything bombed with a very inexplicable .Net error. As it turns out Microsoft announced they were upgrading their Azure SQL servers starting July, 2011: "This upgrade is also significant in that it represents a big first step towards providing a common base and feature set between the cloud SQL Azure service and our upcoming release of SQL Server Code Name 'Denali'."

(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/13/announcing-sql-azure-july-2011-service-release.aspx)

By its very nature, Cloud servers are upgraded and moved around behind the scenes so you don't have to mess with it. OpenAccess failed to take this into account however, and when our SQL Azure server group was upgraded OpenAccess failed to recognize its version and bombed.

Telerik, of course, was very quick about releasing a patch - but it still took them a few days. We couldn't wait that long, unfortunately, having already lost quite a bit of time just trying to figure out what was going on. The practical result was that I got to work nonstop for two days with no sleep to move the whole thing into a regular .Net solution with Entity Framework 4 as the ORM.

So to answer the question: Is Telerik ORM worth learning and / or better than an open source solution? I agree with the above statement that if you already have an open source solution, it is working well, has good performance, and is intuitive to develop against - absolutely stick with that.

The value of open source is the community that supports it and your ability to make changes to the underlying system if need be. Had my project been based on an open source ORM, I could have changed the code to default to the most recent version of SQL if it finds it is working with a version higher, and problem solved - sleep had.

The value of a product like OpenAccess ORM is that it is in competition with other products, open source or otherwise, and it has to: Perform Well, be customer oriented, have a manual (very important), and be easier than doing it yourself or learn an open source system that may or may not be very intuitive.

Throw in that Telerik's support is top notch, and I would say you could do worse - as long as you are willing to give up some control and have to wait for upgrades / patches to handle things like I described above.

Answer 3

First off I want you to know that I am not Telerik evangelist...

We did moved away from Telerik's ASP.NET AJAX controls only because we desired greater control over the look and feel of our UI (we still use the controls for quick internal solutions), but I must say their products are excellent given the right conditions. Our web product team started to use the Open Access ORM for our solutions and honestly we never looked back. The first reason that comes to mind to choose a Telerik solution is grade A support which has never failed to provide a resolution to a problem regarding any of their solutions with in 24hrs usually including sample code... Although I can usually dig through blogs for hours to find solutions for most of my issues regarding Microsoft technology I must say it is nice to have support when we need it.

Answer 4

I would certainly recommend using the Telerik Open access ORM. I have used Telerik products (eg telerik Ajax/Silverlight) for a number of years and they are best in class and the technical support is second to none. The company makes money by providing software that works.

Unfortunately this does not apply to open source since by definition anything can changed without proper control. All it needs is one duff developer and an entire suite can be rendered useless.

In order to use the products correctly, swiftly, and efficiently, it is necessary to be a highly competent web developer.