Data persistence lies at the heart of many of your applications. At the end of the day, you often want to store data, and interact with that data. The Force.com platform provides a powerful and intuitive data persistence layer in the cloud, which I’ve been researching and writing up over the past few weeks. I think it has a load of interesting features such as:

• A metadata driven approach to automatically generating powerful user interfaces for all of your persisted data objects (if you want).
• A web service that lets you modify, create, introspect and search database objects – with a bunch of tools built around the service to get your data into the cloud
• A great integration with the Apex language, making it very easy for you to programatically interact with the database if you need to.
• A neat paradigm of defining relationships between objects (tables) instead of working with foreign keys and such like.
• An interesting formula language that you can use to have fields in your persisted objects automatically derive values from calculations on other fields.
• Fully fledged reporting, straight out of the box.
• A vast array of data security and sharing option.
• And a lot more…

So, check out the article: An Introduction to the Force.com Database!

Comments appreciated!