This is somewhat similar to [this question][1] but more broad.

In general, with ORMs like EF 4.1 supporting POCOs, does it now make sense to have your domain entities **be** the objects that are persisted to your database?

With older ORMs like EF 4 or Linq-to-SQL, your "database objects" were auto-generated, and tightly coupled to your database, and so, for non-trivial applications, were mapped to more robust, intelligent domain entities before being put to work.

Is the idea with newer ORMs to just build robust domain entities, and then have a data-layer that simply provides a mapping between said domain entities and your DBMS?

In writing that I get the feeling that this has **always** been the goal, but not readily (easily) possible with the tools available, at least not in the .NET world. 

 [1]: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/62192/ddd-poco-does-this-makes-sense