Part 4. Databases and infrastructure

In the last part of this book, we will take on the challenges of databases and persistence. Trying to store objects in a relational database is a lot like shoving round pegs into square holes. Once we’ve gone down the object-oriented path, we need to know how to deal with this problem, and the way to deal with it is to use more objects to solve it. We will study database connections and abstraction layers. We will take a look at various ways to handle configuration data such as database names and database user names. And we will use design patterns to ease the difficulty of transforming and translating objects to database data and vice versa.