TIP: NetTiers is (as with most ORM's) only as good as your Database Model...

Since all ORM's are driven, to varying degrees, based upon your Database Model, its critical to understand this seemingly obvious point.   Your ORM mileage will vary proportionally to the quality and completeness of your DB model. 

NetTiers is no different.   In fact, it may be even more critical to get a good solid DB model foundation in place with NetTiers than some of its competitors, since NetTiers generates its code based directly upon your DB model, while other more traditional ORM's use a separate XML (or other) mapping layer to drive the resulting codegen.  So, if you put together a quick & dirty DB with normalization problems, poor primary key selection, lack of foreign keys, lack of indexes, etc. then your output will be just as dirty.

So, before trying out NetTiers for the first time, make sure you minimally have all your Foreign Keys & Primary Key's declared properly.  And if possible, go ahead and add Indexes on any non-key columns that you know are going to be used as filters later.

Indexes are the easiest thing to omit during the initial DB design, since you often want to do some load testing first to determine what indexes are truly needed.  However, Indexes are one of the things Nettiers uses to determine which columns should have their own GetByXXXX() methods in the DAL.   Therefore, its very useful to identify at least the most common and obvious indexes up front.   If you don't do this, you can still do custom filtering, but you must use the Find() method and specify a your own custom WHERE clause.  Unfortunately, this ends up creating more dynamic SQL, while the simple act of specifying an extra index will ensure that a separate Stored Procedure is generated along with a GetByXXXX() method to simplify the effort.