beginner - stuck on data storage

From: Kavvy (kav_at_kav.kav)
Date: 10/28/04 

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:27:59 GMT

I've recently completed the UK Open University course M206 (Computing and
Object Oriented Approach) which uses Smalltalk and a take on UML to teach OO
design and programming.

Upon putting my new skills to practice I've hit upon a problem that the
course never got as far as explaining. How do you actually manage the
storage and retreval of objects to make them persist. I'm using SQL and C#,
and have got as far as guessing that the way forward is some kind of class
that manages the actual data access to SQL.

However, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to have one class that handles it all
and then each class uses that. Or do you implement data access into each
class that requires it?

Also :)

Considering that the way I've been taught suggests that a system contains
all the instances of objects that are currently created, this implies that
you load all the previously created objects from your database upon
execution of the application, and then save whatever objects are left at the
end? If this is the case, then what is the best method to store an objects
relationship with another?

Thanks for reading my questions!
Rich.