We are even going through the debate currently of productivity vs performance. It will be interesting to see if the developers can pull off a quality ORM deployment. I hope they can deliver automated load testing so we can verify this thing won't eat up the Nehalem's when it goes live.....

@justin - There is very little that a DBA needs to know about the ORM tools. The database needs to be designed properly; the rest is up to the ORM/Developer. Developers seem to see the roadblock to productivity as the initial code writing, but DBAs have to live with the implications for the life of the application. So is productivity only to release, or the time it takes to get the app to function properly and run without constant babysitting?

This will basically force developers to become administrators of their systems and the data layer, and the DBAs will simply gather metrics and send out reports showing why things are slow. Their power to fix them will have been diminished considerably. Personally, I know few developers who want the responsibility, and when I put it to them like that, they go back to writing procs.

The Scary DBA reflected on the problems awhile back, the one that many DBAs that I have talked to, encounter.-> http://scarydba.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/nhibernate-first-look-at-tsql/