Applications that rely on very large amounts of data, where individual selections can number in the tens of thousands, require every ounce of performance, every millisecond. Unfortunately, Entity Framework, the most common data access solution, is not known for its speed. Native Ado.net, while very speedy, is not known for its ease of maintenance. Enter Dapper, the data access solution of choice for StackExchange’s StackOverflow community, an area of the web intimately familiar to developers. Why did StackExchange decide to roll their own? Performance, performance, performance. This talk will introduce the audience to Dapper, demonstrate instances where its use makes sense over Entity Framework, and illustrate some simple CRUD operations.