Book Image

NHibernate 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Dr. Gabriel Nicolas Schenker, Aaron Cure
Book Image

NHibernate 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Dr. Gabriel Nicolas Schenker, Aaron Cure

Overview of this book

<p>Ideally, we would want to persist the objects our application uses and produces AS IS, without having to first transform them in complex ways. NHibernate is a framework that provides us with an object-oriented access to a relational database without having to write SQL and with little or no database-specific data access code. Definitely, if you are a .NET developer, knowing more about NHibernate will simplify and reduce your efforts in developing .Net applications.<em>NHibernate 3 Beginner's Guide</em> introduces Nhibernate with step-by-step examples, and is the easiest way to learn about bridging the gap between object-oriented .NET applications and the relational database that stores the application's data. It is a beginner's guide to NHibernate that starts from scratch. Successive chapters build upon earlier concepts, while the sample code presents various ways to accomplish typical data access tasks.</p> <p><em>NHibernate 3 Beginner's Guide</em> examines all of the topics required to get a functional data access layer implemented while writing the least amount of code possible, presenting options along the way to handle particular edge cases or situations as they arise. The book begins with an introduction to NHIbernate 3 and then moves on to creating the development environment. Then it teaches you how to create a model, define a database schema, and map the model to the database then covers sessions and transactions. This is succeeded by testing, profiling, and configuration, validation of data and writing queries. Finally, we wrap up with notes on the common pitfalls that you should avoid.</p> <p>Once you complete reading the book, you will have gained the skills and knowledge to incorporate NHibernate into your own applications.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
NHibernate 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Model first versus data first


In the past, we have been told that the collected data is the most important asset for a company, or to put it in a more pronounced way: "the truth is in the database". Consequently, applications were built with this notion in mind. Business analysts and architects sat down, and first designed the data model. The questions they asked were: "What type of data do we have, and how are the various pieces of data related to each other?". The result of this effort was a so-called Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD).

What makes an entity, such as a Customer specific to a certain company and/or sector? It is not the fact that there is an entity Customer with various attributes, such as name and address, but the real distinction is in how this entity is used. An entity Customer has a totally different meaning in the context of a bank than it has in the context of a travel agency.

Data sitting in a data store is of no value as long as there are no processes defined about...