Building an entity model for use in the rest of the book

Websites and web services usually need to work with data in a relational database or another data store. There are several technologies that could be used, from lower-level ADO.NET to higher-level EF Core. We will use EF Core since it is flexible and more familiar to .NET developers.

In this section, we will define an EF Core entity data model for a database named Northwind stored in SQL Server. It will be used in most of the projects that we create in subsequent chapters.

Northwind database SQL scripts

The script for SQL Server creates 13 tables as well as related views and stored procedures. The SQL scripts are found at https://github.com/markjprice/web-dev-net9/tree/main/scripts/sql-scripts.

There are multiple SQL scripts to choose from, as described in the following list:

• Northwind4AzureSqlEdgeDocker.sql script: To use SQL Server on a local computer in Docker. The script creates the Northwind database. It does not drop it...