// the find
dotnetcore/FreeSql
.NET aot orm, VB.NET/C# orm, Mysql/PostgreSQL/SqlServer/Oracle orm, Sqlite/Firebird/Clickhouse/DuckDB orm, 达梦/金仓/虚谷/翰高/高斯 orm, 神通 orm, 南大通用 orm, 国产 orm, TDengine orm, QuestDB orm, MsAccess orm.
FreeSql is a .NET ORM that supports an unusually wide range of databases — mainstream ones like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, plus a dozen Chinese domestic databases (达梦, 人大金仓, etc.) that EF Core simply doesn't touch. It also claims to be the first .NET ORM with full AOT support, which matters now that NativeAOT is a real deployment target. Primarily aimed at teams in China building enterprise .NET apps, but the AOT story and broad DB coverage are genuinely interesting anywhere.
AOT support is real and tested — the repo has AOT examples and the library explicitly designs around reflection avoidance, which puts it ahead of EF Core on this front. The expression tree query API is expressive and lets you write things like `.Where(a => a.Parent.Parent.Name == "English")` with multi-level navigation without loading the graph first. The split-table/database sharding built into the core (not a paid add-on) is useful for log-heavy apps. The `UseAutoSyncStructure(true)` CodeFirst mode that auto-migrates on startup is genuinely convenient for rapid development, even if you'd turn it off in production.
The English documentation is thin and lags the Chinese docs significantly — you'll hit a wall quickly on anything beyond the basics. The `UseAutoSyncStructure` auto-migration feature is dangerous near production: it's opt-in, but the default examples present it as normal, and a misconfigured connection string will happily alter a prod schema. The performance benchmarks in the README compare FreeSql to Dapper in ways that aren't apples-to-apples (different query shapes) and the results are nearly identical anyway, so the performance claim is noise. Community support is almost entirely in Chinese QQ groups, which is a real friction point for teams outside that ecosystem.