Setting up EF Core
Before we dive into the practicalities of managing data using EF Core, let's briefly talk about choosing between EF Core data providers.
Choosing an EF Core data provider
To manage data in a specific database, we need classes that know how to efficiently talk to that database. EF Core data providers are sets of classes that are optimized for a specific data store. There is even a provider for storing the data in the memory of the current process, which is useful for high-performance unit testing since it avoids hitting an external system.
They are distributed as NuGet packages, as shown in the following table:
| To manage this data store | Install this NuGet package |
|
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or later |
|
|
SQLite 3.7 or later |
|