Understanding what Dapper is and its benefits

Dapper is a performance-focused simple object mapper for .NET that helps map SQL query output to instances of a C# class. It is built and maintained by the Stack Overflow team, has been released as open source, and is a popular alternative to Microsoft's Entity Framework.

So, why use Dapper rather than Entity Framework? The goal of Entity Framework is to abstract away the database, so it trades learning SQL for Entity Framework-specific objects such as DBSet and DataContext. We generally don't write SQL with Entity Framework – instead, we write LINQ queries, which are translated into SQL by Entity Framework.

If we are implementing a large database that serves a large number of users, Entity Framework can be a challenge because the queries it generates can be inefficient. We need to understand Entity Framework well to make it scale, which can be a significant investment...