Creating the entities

Now that we have a data source, we can leverage one of the major advantages of the Code-First approach we talked about earlier and start writing our entity classes early on, without worrying too much about what database engine we'll eventually use.

Truth be told, we already know something about what we'll eventually use. We won't be adopting a NoSQL solution as they aren't officially supported by Entity Framework Core yet; we also don't want to commit ourselves to purchasing expensive license plans, so the commercial editions of Oracle and SQL Server are probably out of the picture as well.

This leaves us with relatively few choices: SQL Server Developer (or Express) Edition, MySQL/MariaDB, the community edition of Oracle (known as Oracle XE), or other less well-known solutions such as PostgreSQL. Furthermore, we are still not 100% sure about installing a local DBMS instance on our development machine (and/or on our production...