Chapter 13. Persistence and modeling

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

—Mark Twain

Today, it’s generally accepted to have a relational database management system (RDBMS) as the foundation of your software architecture. When an RDBMS serves as the foundation, the design and building of a software system is all about designing and building a data-access layer (DAL). In the Microsoft .NET Framework stack, a DAL is made of a bunch of classes using the ADO.NET API or Entity Framework to read from and write to a physical database.

What’s the data model, and what is its role in the overall architecture?

The data model—and more often than not, the relational data model—is the first and most important step in carrying ...

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