Data access layer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:37, 18 April 2009

Revision as of 22:43, 23 June 2009

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Also, business logic methods from an application can be mapped to the Data Access Layer. So, for example, instead of making a query into a database to fetch all users from several tables the application can call a single method from a DAL which abstracts those database calls.

Applications using a data access layer can be either database server dependent or independent. ifIf the data access layer supports multiple database types, the application becomes able to use whatever databases the DAL can talk to. In either circumstance, having a data access layer provides a centralized ___location for all calls into the database, and thus makes it easier to port the application to other database systems (assuming that 100% of the database interaction is done in the DAL for a given application).

[[Object-Relational Mapping]] tools provide data layers in this fashion, following the [[Active record pattern|active record]] model. The ORM/active-record model is popular with web frameworks, but it has not been proven to be better than a straightforward approach of implementing a collection of ___domain-specific data access functions.