Infosys | Microsoft

Sudhansu, very nice paper with statistics that will help Architects to choose and justify selection of any particular data access technology. But I have one doubt: Is WCF Data Services a data access technology on its own? IMHO, it is just an enabler to expose your data as resources (WCF'ying your data) and internally uses another data access technology (like EF, LINQ to SQL).

BTW, we recently created one WCF Data service and finally discarded it after integrating testing in favor of creating and calling a stored procedure using ADO .NET due to performance issues.

Hi Laxman
Thanks for your comment, good to hear from you.
Yes indeed WCF Data Services intrun uses Entity Framework or other LINQ providers as you have mentioned (also check architecture diagram in paper).
However, WCF Data Services have a role to play in niche scenarios like REST enabling, exposing Database entities as services,RSS, ATOM feeds, etc.
To achieve such objectives alone with Entity Framework or ADO.NET would involve significant amount of custom implementation to deliver REST,ATOM feeds, etc. You would appreciate that anything on web will have to be delivered over http.

WCF Data Services uses Http internally and hence understandably it will be less performant than others which uses TCP or others. The same is proved through the performance benchmakring report captured in Appendix.
Hope this helps.