Imagine you’re building a bridge between your software application and a database. Entity Framework (EF) Core is like the engineer designing the bridge, ensuring it can support the traffic between your code and the database efficiently and reliably.
Here’s how it works technically:
Model Creation: You define classes in your .NET application to represent your domain model. These classes typically map to database tables, with properties representing columns.
DbContext: You create a subclass of DbContext, which serves as a bridge between your domain classes and the database. It manages database connections, tracks changes to entities, and provides APIs for querying and saving data.
DbContext
Configuration: You can use data annotations or the Fluent API to configure your entities and their relationships. This includes specifying primary keys, foreign keys, indexes, and other database-specific settings.
Querying: EF Core allows you to write LINQ queries against your entities. These queries are translated into SQL queries by EF Core’s query provider, allowing you to retrieve data from the database using familiar C# syntax.
Change Tracking: When you retrieve entities from the database or create new ones, EF Core keeps track of changes to these entities. It detects which properties have been modified and generates SQL statements to persist these changes when you call SaveChanges().
SaveChanges()
Migrations: EF Core supports database migrations, which are used to evolve the database schema over time. You can create migrations to add, remove, or modify database objects, and EF Core generates SQL scripts to apply these changes to the database.
Database Providers: EF Core supports multiple database providers, each implementing its own database-specific behavior. Providers translate EF Core’s commands and queries into the appropriate SQL dialect for the target database, ensuring compatibility across different database systems.
Overall, EF Core abstracts away the complexities of database interactions, allowing developers to focus on their application logic while maintaining a clean separation between the application and the data layer.