ADO.NET Entity Framework is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for the .NET Framework. This framework is Microsoft's first ORM offering for the .NET Framework. While Microsoft provided objects to manage the Object-relational impedance mismatch, this is their first offering of what can be considered an ORM framework. Visit the houston .net consultant to learn more of this.

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. Learn more about this with the houston .net consultant.

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.

For example, to find the orders of a certain customer, the customer need to be selected from the Customers table, joined with the Orders table, and then projected to remove unwanted columns. The houston .net consultant can provide more information 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.

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 houston .net consultant for 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 information about the ADO.NET Entity Framework, then visit the houston .net consultant for details.