Data Access for high performance application

Recently i was working on a project where application performance was a top priority. I started looking into ORM frameworks and found that ORMs are great for most applications, but when performance is a factor it�s best to write your own data access. So that's when I decided to write my own data access. This article will explain some of the design that i have used in my project. I have used SqlDataReader�s strongly typed Get methods to do a null check and then write the values. Here is my base class in VB.NET.