- What Is a Database?
- Getting Data Out of Databases
- Kinds of Databases
- ODBC
- Database Structure
- Using ADO.NET
- Adding Rows to Database Tables Using ADO.NET
- Building the Façade Classes
- Making the ADO.NET Façade
- Creating Classes for Each Table
- Building the Price Table
- Loading the Database Tables
- The Final Application
Database Structure
At the lowest level, then, a database consists of a series of tables, each having several named columns and some relationships between these tables. This can get pretty complicated to keep track of, and we would like to see some simplification of this in the code we use to manipulate databases.
C# and all of Visual Studio.NETuse a new database access model, called ADO.NET, for ActiveX Data Objects. The design philosophy of ADO.NET is one in which you define a connection between your program and a database and use that connection sporadically, with much of the computation actually taking place in disconnected objects on your local machine. Further, ADO.NET uses XML for definition of the objects that are transmitted between the database and the program, primarily under the covers, although it is possible to access this data description using some of the built-in ADO.NET classes.