Setting up EF Core

Before we dive into the practicalities of managing data using EF Core, let’s briefly talk about choosing between EF Core database providers.

Choosing an EF Core database provider

To manage data in a specific database, we need classes that know how to efficiently talk to that database.

EF Core database providers are sets of classes that are optimized for a specific data store. There is even a provider for storing the data in the memory of the current process, which can be useful for high-performance unit testing since it avoids hitting an external system.

They are distributed as NuGet packages, as shown in the following table: