The ADO.NET Entity Framework, part of the ADO.NET components of the .NET Framework, is a framework for providing services on data models from Microsoft. Although an object-relational mapping service is an important part of it, it aims to provide more services such as query, view and reporting services.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is geared towards solving the mismatch between the formats in which data is stored in a database and in which it is consumed in an object-oriented programming language or other front ends. Learn more about this with the austin .net consultant.

ADO.NET Entity Framework abstracts the relational (logical) schema of the data that is stored in a database and presents its conceptual schema to the application. For example, in the database, entries about a customer and their information can be stored in the Customers table, their orders in the Orders table and their contact information in yet another Contacts table. For an application to deal with this database, it has to know which information is in which table, i.e., the relational schema of the data is hardcoded into the application.

The disadvantage of this approach is that if this schema is changed the application is not shielded from the change. Also, the application has to perform SQL joins to traverse the relationships of the data elements in order to find related data. The austin .net consultant is ready for any questions about this.

This model of traversing relationships between items is very different from the model used in object-oriented programming languages, where the relationships an object features in is exposed as Properties of the object and accessing the property traverses the relationship.

And also, using SQL queries expressed as strings, only to have it processed by the database, keeps the programming language from making any guarantees about the operation and from providing compile time type information. Visit the austin .net consultant to know more about this.

The mapping of the logical schema into the physical schema that defines how the data is structured and stored on the disk is the job of the database system and client side data access mechanisms are shielded from it as the database exposes the data in the way specified by its logical schema. For more details, then visit the austin .net consultant.