I'm going to start a new project which is going to be small initially but may grow to big over the years. I'm strongly convinced that I'm going to use ASP.NET MVC with jQuery for UI. I want to go for MySQL as database for some reasons but worried on few things.

I've a good years of experience working on SQL Server databases and on one project I've had a bad experience creating and managing stored procedures on MySQL database. I'm totally new to Linq but I see that it is easier to use once you are familiar with it.

First thing is that accessing data should be easy. So I thought I should use MySQL to Linq but somewhere I read that it is not directly supported but MySQL .NET connector adds support for EntityFramework. I don't know what are the pros and cons of it. I would love if I can implement repository pattern. Will it be possible if I use Entity Framework?

I'm not clear on how I should go about all this or I should just forget every thing and directly use SQL to Linq on SQL Server.

I'm also concerned about the performance. Someone told me that if we use Entity framework it fetches lot of data and then filter it. Is that right?