We now understand that Dapper is a simple way of interacting with a database in a performant manner. It's a great choice when our team already has SQL Server skills because it doesn't abstract the database away from us.

We learned that Dapper adds various extension methods on the ADO.NET SqlConnection object for reading and writing to the database. Dapper maps the results of a query to instances of a C# class automatically by matching field names in the query result to the class properties. Query parameters can be passed in using a C# class with Dapper automatically mapping properties in the C# class to the SQL parameters.

We discovered that DbUp is a simple open source tool that can be used to manage database migrations. We embed SQL Scripts within our project and write code that is executed when our app loads to instruct DbUp to check and perform any necessary migrations.

In the next chapter, we are going to create the RESTful API for our app leveraging the data access code we have written in this chapter.