Where is the line between DAL and ORM?

Question

The terms are often thrown around interchangeably, and there\'s clearly considerable overlap, but just as often it seems implied that people see something strongly implied by sa

Answer 1

I think an ORM is capable of mapping any set of objects to a relational database; whereas a DAL is specific to your application, and probably couldn't naturally be extended to support other objects.

Not only that, but a ORM specifically is concerned with mapping classes to/from the database entities, while a DAL may simply be a way for you to access the data in a database, without any mapping.