Deciding on a data layer for your application is one of the most important decisions you will make and there is no shortage of viable options.  In the .NET world you have full fledged ORM’s such as Entity Framework or NHibernate.  There are also a large number of micro-ORM’s that solve many of the pain points of writing your data layer directly while still allowing you to manually control the actual SQL used.  Last, you always have the option of rolling your own, though there are many reasons why this is not usually the right choice.