UnitOfWork vs Database connection

I currently have made a UnitOfWork implementation which wraps both the database connection and the transaction.

using (var uow = UnitOfWorkFactory.Create())
{
    // do db operations here through repositories

   uow.SaveChanges();
}

Rollback will be called 开发者_StackOverflow中文版if SaveChanges haven't been called before the uow gets disposed.

Is it a bad design choice to let the uow handle both the connection and the transaction?

Let's say that I got a ASP.Net MVC website where most of the actions are just fetching information from the database. Are there a performance penalty for creating/committing transactions that aren't actually not doing anything in the database?

If you want to implement UoW then SaveChanges should be the only place where a connection and a transaction will be used. UoW will just collect all commands that must be executed and execute them in a transaction when SaveChanges is invoked.

UoW is domain specific. I had more-or-less the same implementation you use until someone pointed this out since database access should not really influence your domain.

So I ended up splitting the responsibilities. Since my UoW does make use of repositories that require a connection to a database I still require a connection.

So for instances where I do not require a UoW I will have this:

using (DatabaseConnectionFactory.Create()) { ... }

For transaction:

using (var connection = DatabaseConnectionFactory.Create().BeginTransaction()) 
{
    // do stuff

    connection.CommitTransaction();
}

If I require a UoW (typically with transaction):

using (var connection = DatabaseConnectionFactory.Create().BeginTransaction())
using (var uow = UnitOfWorkFactory.Create())
{
    // do stuff

    connection.CommitTransaction();
}

HTH

Did you implement the Unit of Work yourself (I'm assuming you did). Look into using ADO.NET EF with the Repository pattern.

There is a big camp that feels any database operation should be wrapped in a transaction. You should for sure wrap any Inserts / Updates / Deletes in a transaction.

That being said, wrap any of the database objects that implement IDisposable in a Using Block.