Modeling the Business Data

An important step in this whole story is the creation of a model of the business data that you want to get access to. Behind the scenes, the model that you create is stored in a number of tables that are part of the SSP database. We refer to this collection of tables as the metadata store of the BDC.

Seasoned SharePoint developers know very well that it is not a good practice to perform work directly in the databases that are used by SharePoint when, for example, they are accessing content that is stored in the various lists and document libraries that are part of the SharePoint sites. The object models are there to abstract that data layer. The same is true for the BDC.

There are basically two ways of constructing a business ...

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