Is there a difference between an Entity and a object?

Question

Hi,

Is there a difference between the terms Entity and Object?

Answer 1

Generally speaking, an entity is an abstract concept that's typically represented by a table in a database schema. The term object usually refers to in-memory data structures. An object that represents an entity may be called an entity object (often mapped to a row in a database table), that is it's an instance of an entity class (often mapped to a table).

In the .NET Framework (3.5 SP1) an entity is part of an instance of the EDM (Entity Data Model), and is mapped to one or more tables. For example, ther can be a Customer entity that can map to a single Customer database table or it may also extend to a CustomerPreferences table as well. Using the EntityProvider, you can access entites as if they were database tables using eSQL. The EDM model is also known as the conceptual layer.

There is another layer on top of the EDM model known as the object layer, where entities are materialized as EDM-mapped objects.