Data is king in the world of software applications, either in the form of databases, files, streams, and so on. It's very hard to find applications that don't interact with the database. In the previous chapter, you learnt a great deal about the ASP.NET Core handling requests in the form of routes, middleware, and filters, and its security mechanism; they form the faceless frontend of the application.
Until now, we haven't talked about ASP.NET Core dealing with the backend (a popular term for storage of data), that is, with databases. Any ASP.NET Core (Web API) will definitely have to integrate with databases at some point of time during application development or right from the beginning.
Microsoft SQL Server was often considered the go-to database for ASP.NET apps. Now with ASP.NET Core, integration with different kinds of database is...