About Dali

Looking for information about Dali? Sorry, but Dali, the intelligent data access layer, is no more. We stopped enhancing Dali when LINQ was released. LINQ does almost everything Dali did, plus a lot more.  So Dali went the way of the Dodo.  After Dali’s extinction, Revelation Technologies went back to focusing on its core services in IT consulting.  As for Dali, well, we still think it was a great product in its time.  We occasionally hear stories of people who are still using it.

What was Dali?

If you’re not familiar with Dali and just followed a link to this site, here’s a description of what Dali was…

Dali was a self-configuring object-relational mapper and data access layer that connected your .NET classes to your relational database—without requiring code generation and with little or no code changes. By analyzing your classes and database structure, Dali dynamically generated and cached all the necessary SQL to perform create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations; automatically and behind the scenes. There was no need to know SQL or even ADO.NET, nor were there any mapping files or query languages to learn.

Dali could reduce the amount of code you need to connect your application or website to your database by up to 80%—that’s one fifth of what it would be using straight ADO.NET. This was the ratio demonstrated by our Sample Web Solution that was included with the Trial Edition download. Unlike code generators, Dali could work with your existing business objects or web forms, allowing them to become database-aware. And of course, less code results in faster development time and less errors.

Dali abstracted complex database commands inside a simple class library. Easy to use methods like Load() and Save() did all the work of loading an object’s data from the database and saving the object’s data back to the database. If you knew basic object oriented principles and could create classes, you already had what it took to use Dali. In some cases, you could your code using Dali within minutes.

Pretty amazing, huh?  We thought so too.