ADO.NET Entity Framework (Object/Relational Mapping)

You may heard of Hibernate if people are talking about ORM. What ORM tools can Microsoft deliver? Here you go:

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework that enables developers to work with relational data as domain-specific objects, eliminating the need for most of the data access plumbing code that developers usually need to write. Using the Entity Framework, developers issue queries using LINQ, then retrieve and manipulate data as strongly typed objects. The Entity Framework’s ORM implementation provides services like change tracking, identity resolution, lazy loading, and query translation so that developers can focus on the application-specific business logic rather than the data access fundamentals.




The Entity Framework uses the Entity Data Model (EDM) to describe the application-specific object or “conceptual” model against which the developer programs. The EDM builds on the widely known Entity Relationship model (introduced by Dr. Peter Chen) to raise the abstraction level above logical database schemas. The EDM was developed with the primary goal of becoming the common data model across a suite of developer and server technologies from Microsoft.

Extract from ADO.NET Entity Framework At-a-Glance
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