Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Introducing the Entity Framework

The Entity Framework (EF) is a general-purpose ORM (similar to a LINQ to SQL data model, yet more powerful) that works with a number of data providers, including SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, DB2, Oracle, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. It allows you to work with conceptual entity classes that are loosely coupled to the data storage layer. It provides flexibility with respect to how you choose to define your business objects’ properties and their relationships to other objects. It offers a built-in persistence and change-tracking mechanism that makes it easy to reflect runtime changes to these objects in the underlying database and vice versa.

The first step in working with EF is to create an Entity ...