Which ORM framework can best handle an MVCC database design?

Question

When designing a database to use MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control), you create tables with either a boolean field like "IsLatest" or an integer "VersionId", and you never do any updates, you only insert new records when things change.

MVCC gives you automatic auditing for applications that require a detailed history, and it also relieves pressure on the database with regards to update locks. The cons are that it makes your data size much bigger and slows down selects, due to the extra clause necessary to get the latest version. It also makes foreign keys more complicated.

(Note that I'm not talking about the native MVCC support in RDBMSs like SQL Server's snapshot isolation level)

This has been discussed in other posts here on Stack Overflow. [todo - links]

I am wondering, which of the prevalent entity/ORM frameworks (Linq to Sql, ADO.NET EF, Hibernate, etc) can cleanly support this type of design? This is a major change to the typical ActiveRecord design pattern, so I'm not sure if the majority of tools that are out there could help someone who decides to go this route with their data model. I'm particularly interested in how foreign keys would be handled, because I'm not even sure of the best way to data model them to support MVCC.

Answer 1

I might consider implementing the MVCC tier purely in the DB, using stored procs and views to handle my data operations. Then you could present a reasonable API to any ORM that was capable of mapping to and from stored procs, and you could let the DB deal with the data integrity issues (since it's pretty much build for that). If you went this way, you might want to look at a more pure Mapping solution like IBatis or IBatis.net.