O/RM Survey Results, No clear winner

After a couple weeks of open voting and a fairly good sample size, one conclusion is clear: there is no single winner in the .NET O/RM space. Running away with 32% of the vote is the ambiguous "other" category, which means respondents use one of the (seemingly) hundreds of .NET O/RM tools not listed explicitly in this survey. But more on that later. What I found most surprising in these results is how popular LinqToSql and SubSonic are versus old vanguard NHibernate. By all measures, NHibernate- which has its roots in the Java Hibernate project- has more features and power than LinqToSql or SubSonic, but clearly those features aren't winning as many users as I would have guessed. The fact that SubSonic and LinqToSql polled so highly indicates to me developers are more interested in tools that make O/RM easy versus providing every configuration point possible.

Also interesting in these results is the fact that only 15% of respondents chose to do O/RM work by hand. That means the other 85% of you chose some O/RM product or another to help you manage your data access and business objects. That begs the question, "Why do 15% choose to code their O/RM by hand?" Price of O/RM solutions? Available features? Stubbornness? Whatever the case, if you're hand coding your O/RM, you're in the minority.

Finally, the "other" category opens up an interesting area for follow-up. Which .NET O/RM products are you using that I did not include in the survey? I'd be very interested to hear in the comments from those of you that voted "other" telling us which .NET O/RM you use. I doubt the full 32% in this category are using the same .NET O/RM, but it would be interesting to see if another popular choice is buried in these results.

Sound-off in the comments with your .NET O/RM choice du jour and then vote in the next poll on RSS subscription habits.