Telerik OpenAccess ORM is designed to support data-centric applications and services, and provides a platform for programming against data that raises the level of abstraction from the logical relational level to the conceptual level. By enabling developers to work with data at a greater level of abstraction, Telerik OpenAccess ORM supports code that is independent of any particular data storage engine or relational schema.
Telerik OpenAccess ORM supports a Data Model for defining data at both the storage and the conceptual level and a mapping between the two. It also enables developers to program directly against the data types defined at the conceptual level as CLR objects. Telerik OpenAccess ORM maps a database to a persistent class model by either applying attributes or by using an external XML mapping file. A persistent class is just like any normal object class that you might define as part of your application, except that it is annotated with special information that associates it with a particular database table. These annotations are made either as CLR Attributes Mapping on your class declaration or as an external XML File.
Telerik OpenAccess ORM provides tools to generate the related CLR objects based on an existing database. This reduces lots of data access code that used to be required to create object-based data applications and services, and makes it faster when creating object-oriented data applications and services from an existing database.
The topics in this section are designed to help you understand how to use Telerik OpenAccess ORM quickly by explaining the underlying technologies in the context of the Quickstart tutorial.