<rant strength="veryMild">

A bit of a personal bugbear.

I've met a lot of folks who say things like "How do you compare LINQ and traditional data access?" or something along those lines.

Please.

You've got to stop calling it "LINQ" :-)

LINQ is not necessarily anything to do with relational database access.

In .NET Framework V3.5 we have;

• LINQ to Objects
• LINQ to XML
• LINQ to SQL ( relational )

"Coming Soon" we have things like;

• ADO.NET Entity Framework with a LINQ API ( relational )
• ADO.NET Data Services where the client code generation pieces take LINQ queries and construct URI's from them.

That's at least 5 LINQ pieces from Microsoft already but there are lots of LINQ enabled things going on out there such as;

• Flickr, Active Directory, SharePoint, etc. etc. etc ( there's a reasonable list up here )

Come on - use "LINQ TO...." when you're talking about LINQ, otherwise everyone (well, me anyway) just gets mixed up :-)

</rant>