It is nearly impossible today to write enterprise software without the use of one or more relational

databases. Granted, in some cases the data is transient and not stored in a database, but

for the most part software needs to consume and manipulate the data in a database. Easy enough,

right? You put the lime in the coconut and you’ve got yourself a data-aware software application.

Wrong! There are hundreds of ways to connect software systems to databases and thousands of

people who think they have the skeleton key for data access layers. I can’t say that I have the

end-all pattern for data access, but I do have an efficient, repeatable way to apply industry

design patterns to build scalable object-oriented persistence layers.

Object-relational mapping (ORM) has been a gray area in Microsoft