NHibernate Vs Entity Framework 6.0 – A Comparison

Here is a nice comparison table for NHibernate and Entity framework 6.0. This is the result of my searching and reading, to get to know over the evolution of Entity Framework (the latest is V6.0). Enjoy reading!

Feature	NHibernate	EF 1.0 to EF 6.0
Current version	V3.3.3	V 6.0
Year released	Hibernate (JAVA) 2001/ NHibernate (.NET) 2005	2008
Introduced	.NET 1.1 and above/Mono	.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and above
Open source	Yes	Yes from 6.0
Associations	Both supports 1 to 1, 1 to many, and many to many	Both supports  1 to 1, 1 to many, and many to many
Rich domain models	Yes	No
Ordered and unordered sets collection. Indexed options. It even has an immutable, indexed list	Yes	No
Mapping private fields (yet) or can you directly use a dictionary class	Yes	No
Collection supports	IDictionary<T,T>  IEnumerable<T>	ICollections
Supporting ENUM	Yes	Yes from 6.0
Vendor support /Providers: SQL Server/Azure, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Firebird and DB2	All the DB providers are built-in	SQL Server or SQL Azure,
Code first	Yes	From EF 5.0
Code-based mapping	NHinernate 3.2 with Fluent-NHibernate	From EF 6.0
Supporting custom types and collections	Yes	No
Query flexibility	HQL/QueryOver/Criteria API/Native Vendor specific SQL (3.2 with the above & lot more)	LINQ/Entity SQL/Native SQL/Commercial  provider for ORACLE
Extensibility	Uses Listeners/Configuration properties	ServiceLocator pattern
Async/await support	No	EF 6
Built-in support for automatically reconnecting to the database	No	Yes
.NET 4.5 support	Yes	Yes (with improved performance)
Batch processing	With “Future”	No
Creating a DBContext with an existing open connection	No	Yes
Spatial support	Need 3rd party	In-built
Documentation	Poor, but can get lot of support over forum	Good
Caching	Support second-level caching	Yes from EF6
Events	“NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution”.	Entity Framework only has two event-based extension points: ObjectMaterialized and SavingChanges
Tracking Changes	No	While both default to change tracking at the unit of work level, Entity Framework also offers self-tracking entities.
Able to map SQL views	Yes	No
Querying SSAS OLAP cubes	No	Yes
Interception of queries/object creation	Yes	No
API Methods	Save, Update, SaveOrUpdate, SaveOrUpdateCopy, Replicate and Merge,
Lazy loading behavior	One an relationship by relationship basis	For the entire context

Courtesy:

http://dotnet.dzone.com/articles/entity-framework-56-vs

http://weblogs.asp.net/ricardoperes/archive/2012/06/07/differences-between-nhibernate-and-entity-framework.aspx