Task list

Whether you tend to think about problems like a programmer or a database analyst, Entity Framework can probably help, but it will still be easier to understand what’s going on if you understand the basics of each side of the impedance mismatch, if for no other reason than Entity Framework blends the vocabulary from each side, and we need to be sure what those technical terms mean. So that’s what we’ll do in the rest of this chapter: Take a quick tour of relational database design and OOA&D and how Entity Framework sits between them.

The impedance mismatch

We’ll start by taking one last look at what it is that the Entity Framework is supposed to help you do.

The database side

When you use Entity Framework, you don’t have to worry too much about how to design relational databases, but building and querying models will be a lot easier if you understand some of the concepts, so we’ll examine that next.

The OOA&D side

Finally, after we’ve explored relational database concepts, we’ll look at how they map to OOA&D (and see how tedious that can be without Entity Framework’s help).