Key Features of NHibernate

• Natural programming model - NHibernate supports natural OO idiom; inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the .NET collections framework, including generic collections.

• Native .NET - NHibernate API uses .NET conventions and idioms

• Support for fine-grained object models - a rich variety of mappings for collections and dependent objects

• No build-time bytecode enhancement - there's no extra code generation or bytecode processing steps in your build procedure

• The query options - NHibernate addresses both sides of the problem; not only how to get objects into the database, but also how to get them out again

• Custom SQL - specify the exact SQL that NHibernate should use to persist your objects. Stored procedures are supported on Microsoft SQL Server.

• Support for "conversations" - NHibernate supports long-lived persistence contexts, detach/reattach of objects, and takes care of optimistic locking automatically

• Free/open source - NHibernate is licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License)

cortesy: Hibernate-Website

About NHibernate

NHibernate is an Object-relational mapping (ORM) solution for the Microsoft .NET platform: it provides a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. Its purpose is to relieve the developer from a significant portion of relational data persistence-related programming tasks.

NHibernate is free as open source software that is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

NHibernate is a port of the popular Java O/R mapper Hibernate to .NET. Version 1.0 mirrored the feature set of Hibernate 2.1, as well as a number of features from Hibernate 3.

NHibernate 1.2.1, released in November 2007, introduced many more features from Hibernate 3 and support for .NET 2.0, stored procedures, generics, and nullable types.

NHibernate 2.0 was released August 23, 2008. It is comparable to Hibernate 3.2 in terms of features.

NHibernate 2.1 is currently under development and should be released in mid 2009.

NHibernate 3.0 will be the first version to use .Net 3.5.

A partial implementation of a LINQ provider is available for 2.1. A new AST parser which can transform HQL (Hibernate Query Language) or LINQ is in development for a future version of NHibernate.

courtesy: Wikipedia