It seems like batching is a data access "theme" at the moment (much like Castle, IOC & IronPython are all themes in the NZ Blogspace at the moment... even though none of them could be considered new, I've been using Castle IoC container for 1 & 1/2 years now!) - no sooner do I discover the batching support in the Rhino.Commons library, it appears NHibernate now supports it in the latest beta drop and it's a planned feature for the upcoming version 3 of the enterprise library ... It's interesting that this support never made it's way into the framework itself for version 2.0, it's all but there.

On the flip side, for NHibernate at least, the performance boons of batching are impressive (see below for an image from Ayende's blog where he's done some profiling), I haven't checked Base4.net out in a while, but I wonder if Alex James has had a chance to implement batching support yet? - maybe I should make that my task for the weekend (checking out base4.net again that is heh... not implementing support ;o)