Milestone 2: Data Persistence & ORMs

🟨 Milestone 2: Data Persistence & ORMs

Learn to build high-performance data layers by understanding the Mechanics of the database driver before the Abstractions of the ORMs.

🗄️ Database Foundations (The Driver)

• The Mechanic: ADO.NET & Raw SQL: The forward-only DataReader and SQL commands.
• The Mechanic: SQL Bulk Copy: High-performance mass data ingestion.
• The Abstraction: Dapper Micro-ORM: High-performance Micro-ORM that feels like raw SQL.

🏗️ Enterprise Persistence (The ORM)

• The Abstraction: EF Core (The Warehouse): Object-Relational Mapping, LINQ, and Migrations.
• The Tune-Up: Entity Framework Performance: Tuning your database queries with projections and no-tracking.

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Professor’s Note

“An ORM is a tool for productivity, but ADO.NET is the tool for mastery. If you don’t know what an IDataReader is, you’ll never understand why your EF Core queries are allocating 50MB of RAM for a 1MB result.”