FluentMigrator vs log4net

Log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. In case of problems with an application, it is helpful to enable logging so that the problem can be located. With log4net it is possible to enable logging at runtime without modifying the application binary. The log4net package is designed so that log statements can remain in shipped code without incurring a high performance cost. It follows that the speed of logging (or rather not logging) is crucial. At the same time, log output can be so voluminous that it quickly becomes overwhelming. One of the distinctive features of log4net is the notion of hierarchical loggers. Using these loggers it is possible to selectively control which log statements are output at arbitrary granularity. log4net is designed with two distinct goals in mind: speed and flexibility.

FluentMigrator is a database migration framework for .NET written in C#. The basic idea is that you can create migrations which are simply classes that derive from the Migration base class and have a Migration attribute with a unique version number attached to them. Upon executing FluentMigrator, you tell it which version to migrate to and it will run all necessary migrations in order to bring your database up to that version. In addition to forward migration support, FluentMigrator also supports different ways to execute the migrations along with selective migrations called profiles and executing arbitrary SQL.