Has a history, but widely
adopted only since open-source
Hibernate project started, 2001-2002.
The Hibernate project [7]
was founded and led by Gavin King, a Java/J2EE
software developer, now part of
Jboss. King wrote an excellent book [3].
Microsoft has adopted a
comparable approach with EDM, Entity
Data Model and its Entity Framework, for release this year. [1,
10]
Both Hibernate and EDM
support (or will support) multiple databases:
Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, …