Understanding data integration in minimal APIs
In the first chapter, we defined APIs and their purpose. It is worth reiterating this definition in relation to data sources. APIs act as a gateway to a system, offering programmatic access to that system.
In many cases, the objective of a client connecting to a system via an API is to work with data. That data has to be stored somewhere – preferably a source separate from the API itself so that it can be externally managed and persistent.
minimal APIs offer various connection methods to data sources. For the purposes of this chapter, we are going to focus on the most common persistent data storage types, those being SQL and NoSQL.
SQL versus NoSQL
It’s highly likely that as a reader of this book, you are at least somewhat familiar with SQL and NoSQL, but by way of a brief primer, SQL databases are relational databases, meaning that data is stored in a collection of tables, with records represented by rows and...
