Getting Started with Dapper in .NET 

There is should be no debate about "do I need to learn SQL?"... You HAVE TO!

I use EFCore. But I think a Dapper deep dive would be great. Dometrain rocks btw

I love Dapper, but struggle to implement third-party grids (Telerik or DevExpress) because they favor EF Code. Would love a video on how to get a grid working with Dapper efficiently! In other words, I don't want to return 100k rows to a grid, just so it can show 20. I want the grid to only pick up the 20 rows it needs, and so far the only way I've been able to do that is with a custom grid implementation with Dapper.

Nice! Would like a deep dive or have access to some dapper best practice in your course material. One thing that was mentioned in the video - "remember to dispose your connections" - please show this. An additional video where CancellationToken is passed onto the Dapper methods would be nice. An video showing join, splitOn etc. would be helpful for people, I believe.

Thank you so much. Would be great if you can do a deep dive into db connection pooling. 🙏

Interesting. When using Dapper, I'd typically use a closed connection. Since it's clever about opening and closing connections (that it has opened). In rare instances (multi command transactions stuff) I'd open the connection before hand. Curious as to your thoughts Nick.

Hope you will make a follow up for queries with multiple joins where column names are duplicates cause tgats where ef's linq shines an dapper becomes annoying.

What is the point of abstracting the connection factory behind the interface when you write prostgres specific SQL in the movie service anyway?

Is it a good idea to make a "Wrapper" / helper class around dapper (I've seen people calling it a Generic Repository) instead of having to create a connection in every method we'd just inject that wrapper class and use it? Something that would for example take care of the connection and transactions and disposing them and maybe having default values set for the dapper methods for example the connection timeout or if you use Stored Procedures the majority of the time, set the command type to stored procedure by default?

Certainly a hands on! And I wouldn't trust a teammate who doesn't know SQL. Thanks for a great video

I prefer dapper just because I know what the SQL is doing. It would be good in you follow ups if you go over the various ways of dealing with a parent child relationships(order/order items).

I would like to see your approach for mapping forth and back with object graphs and joined queries (JOIN and/or LEFT JOIN). Find it to be a little complicated and maybe it's my approach is not the best one

I love dapper . But usually i pass the class objects in stored procedure and make it work . Inline queries require redeployment to modify some logic once deployed .

dapper with T-SQL are most minimal good c# coding

It's crazy how Rider is miles ahead from vs 2022. I need to start using it all asap

Many thank for sharing. Despite I basically hate EF Core 🙂I use it anyway. I guess benefits outweight the problems. Deep dive into EF Core and/or Dapper would be great, SQL does not go anywhere so it is always good to know more 🙂

@nickchapsas - Dapper is really quite nice. I think one of the good things about it is it forces developers to be a bit more hands-on with the DB and that is a really good thing. I come across a great many people who are missing that slightly deeper knowledge of RDBMS systems and I think that stems from hiding behind do-it-all (until they dont) ORMs (same in the Java world with Hibernate). Code first is powerful at times - but not always optimal - learn the technologies you use. I also love that you've created tables that use names that adhere to the Postgres standards. The number of times I've seen postgres DBs with tables/views/fields tha don't adhere to these standards makes me sad - I really don't want to have to be using ANSI quoted column and table/view names when I'm building queries.

Is using sql in code wise/good?

> I will show you how you can get started with Dapper in 2025 I guess we'll have to wait a few months to be able to use this knowledge.

Let's goooo dapper

Great video!

Can you do some video about database scaffolding tools? You mentioned EF Core has one but Dapper no. And there are other libraries for that. Maybe you have experience with any to share knowledge with us?

I love dapper. I used it all the time at my previous job. I was still working on my degree back then, and I implemented a Dapper-like system myself from scratch, and I included that in every single school project, because the school did not allow me to use packages for the data access layer. Probably not as optimized as Dapper itself, but easy inserts, easy reads etc, was really nice. Only thing I wish for is that inserting a list of objects was quicker in Dapper. At my old job we sometimes had to inserts which ranged between 1,000 and 1,000,000 records. Dapper would take ages, while the SqlBulkCopy did it in a fraction of the time. Not sure if this has changed in recent years with Dapper, but it was one of the pain points I had with it.

I love Dapper and how close to real SQL it makes it. I just wish it was still under development. There are some features it is missing still.

What about transactions?

Hallo! Would have been nice to tell that you can run procedures aswell... So you dont have to mix SQL and C#... I prefer that approach whenever possible.

1) Learn SQL................ 2) Start with EF Core, then, if you really really need to optimize the queries (e.g. you're constantly fetching and pushing thousands of rows) OR if you need to use some DB-specific concept that EF Core doesn't support (yet), use Dapper. Reason I usually go with EF Core first: 1) EF Core makes renaming things so, so much easier. E.g., in the example Nick gave, if he had just refactor renamed the property on the class directly from "YearOfRelease" to "Year". The compiler wouldn't have yelled at him to also take a look at the queries. (this is why I always use anonymous objects and never just give a Dapper query an object with properties that COULD change at any time). 2) You can be 90% sure that, if the EF Core query builds, everything will just work. It might not be optimal, but it will work. This opposed to Dapper where, if you forget a comma or you didn't use brackets in a way the DB can understand, everything will compile, but you will crash AT RUNTIME 😶‍🌫

i wonder when dapper will support Span

Our main application at work uses EFCore. It was already built. But when I have to do automation applications and such and need database access I use Dapper. Dapper is so easy. EFCore is easy to but take away a lot of control.

What about DB migrations combined with Dapper?

Any way we could pool the connection and re-use it instead of creating a new connection each time? Is it even a good idea to do that?

does this match with the repository pattern ?

Ef core vs dapper

Ahhh finally, not using EF!

SqlKata has a much nicer API in my opinion

Meh... Still prefer EF Core for 99% of the things.

Is this a reupload or am I having a deja vu?

Show also DynamicParametrs and pls say in video what about interpolation like: $"SELECT {m.Id} {m.Title} {m.YearOfRelease} FROM {nameof(Movie)}" Is it worse and explain pls why. THX waiting for a new video!

The IDbConnection seems like a bit of a leaky abstraction here. In theory you shouldn't know or care what the concrete implementation is you're using, but in practice you need to know it's the postgres implementation because if you write t-sql (for example) it's eventually gonna not work.

EF 8 is good enough.

Tell me 3 things you can do in Dapper that you can not do in EF.

I dpn't see any reason in this video - dislike. It shows some stupid things, but did not add anything new. And in the end - is highly opitionated. Video did not expose nor strong things of Dapper or other solutions, nor did not show EF deficiencies.