Working with the ADO.NET Entity Client

The ADO.NET Entity Client is a data provider that provides a gateway to execute entity level queries using Entity Framework. You can use it to query against your conceptual model of data. Entity Client uses its own language called E-SQL, a storage independent language, to communicate with the conceptual model. You can execute the same E-SQL query against any data store. In other words, it is provider independent, and you need not make changes to your query if the underlying data store changes. Therefore, you can use the same E-SQL syntax to communicate to the conceptual model, regardless of the data store in use.

The E-SQL queries are converted to a command tree that is in turn passed to the storage-specific provider to generate native SQL statements. As an example, if you are using SQL Server as the database, the E-SQL queries that you are using will be converted to a command tree that will be passed to the ADO.NET provider for the SQL Server. This...