In this episode, we are joined by former private equity-backed DSO operator and Zentist's current Vice President of Revenue, Sina S. Amiri, to discuss the essential RCM metrics that DSOs should ...

Revenue Cycle Management Through the Lens of a Former DSO Executive

Counsel at Kaufman Dolowich Voluck on Tuesday removed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against online billing platform Zentist to Pennsylvania Middle District Court. The suit was filed by Barley ...

Removed To Federal Court

Leading up to the annual FireFish Festival in downtown Lorain on Sept. 16, festival organizers...

Lorain County

First-Of-Its-Kind Event Returns With Exclusive Curriculum Targeted To Dental Support Organization (DSO) Professionals SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Zentist today announced the return ...

Zentist Announces Second Revenue Cycle Management Bootcamp for Group Dentistry

First-Of-Its-Kind Event Returns With Exclusive Curriculum Targeted To Dental Support Organization (DSO) Professionals SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Zentist today announced the return of the Dental Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) Bootcamp ...

Midwest DSO Sees 53% Improvement Across Its Insurance RCM Operations SAN FRANCISCO, October 27, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zentist announced today that, less than 100 days after deployment in Great Lakes Dental Partners offices, its Remit AI software increased ...

Zentist’s Remit AI Platform More Than Doubles RCM Productivity for Great Lakes Dental Partners in Under 100 Days

Midwest DSO Sees 53% Improvement Across Its Insurance RCM Operations SAN FRANCISCO, October 27, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zentist announced today that, less than 100 days after deployment in Great ...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Zentist today announced the return of the Dental Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) Bootcamp, a unique professional development opportunity in the dental support organization (DSO) industry. The event will feature ...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Zentist today announced the return of the Dental Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) Bootcamp, a unique professional development opportunity in the dental ...

Zentist

zentist

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your  background. I am passionate about using technology to solve hard problems in complex and highly regulated industries. I found the problem of U.S. dental insurance billing to be a perfect candidate for disruption. Currently, I am working as the Co-Founder and CEO at Zentist, where I set the direction and strategy for the company. Prior to founding Zentist, I spent more than 10 years in corporate financing and investments at various large international financial institutions. I served as the Chief Investment Officer of National Investment Corporation, a $100B sovereign wealth fund in Central Asia. Prior to that, I served as the Head of Corporate Finance at Samruk-Kazyna, an $80B sovereign wealth fund focused on regional investments in Central Asia. I graduated with a dual MBA from the London Business School and Columbia Business School. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? Zentist. We are automating the insurance billing process and revenue cycle management for dental practices and dental groups in the US. What is the origin story? I co-founded Zentist with Manuchehr Kurbonali and Paulina Song in 2016 with the mission of bringing transparency and affordability to financial transactions in dental care. In the first few years, we discovered that the biggest impact area that serves our mission is insurance claim transactions. We built the Zentist platform with the goal of helping dental practices collect insurance claim reimbursements faster and more accurately by leveraging software and process automation. Prior to Zentist, Manuchehr and I built a large network of primary care and diagnostic centers in Central Asia that serves a population of 5M people across 4 cities. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? What I love about our team: A very diverse group of people from different walks of life share the same mission, vision, and passion for overhauling how insurance transactions are handled. That we build real and friendly relationships with our customers and the market we serve. We are the right group of folks to solve this problem because: Many of us - families, and friends - are dentists and folks who have been part of the dental industry for quite a long time. We’re insiders to the problem. As consumers, we would like to have a better experience and significantly fewer headaches when trying to pay for our dental care. We would like to solve this problem for ourselves and everyone else. We’ve brought together a team of world-class software engineers, product managers, designers, and operations experts to share their expertise and experiences in solving the very specific problems found in dental insurance transactions. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? Investing in social impact initiatives that leverage new and emerging technologies to make our lives better. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? We align our success with the success of our customers by delivering efficient and effective insurance billing results including: The speed at which we are able to collect insurance revenue compared to industry averages. How accurately claims are processed the first time around so the system does not create excess operational work for our customers’ back-office operations. Whether we are collecting insurance revenue as close as to our estimate of collections, the collection ratios are best in the industry How much back-office work in dental practices we are able to eliminate, so that office staff can primarily focus on patient care and satisfaction. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? Today, we process more than $250M in insurance billings per year and have grown more than 20x in the past 2 years. Our average collection time cycle is less than 12 days when the industry average is more than 22-24 days. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? We’re excited about the application of AI and RPA to dental insurance transactions - and how they can be leveraged to increase automation of tedious, mundane, back-office tasks. We’re worried about the level of openness of insurance carriers to technology adoption that brings transparency. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? We are bringing to dental care, which is a highly regulated and sophisticated industry, many technologies that are already in use and leveraged in other parts of our lives – like AI, RPA, automation, and the cloud. However, the problems in healthcare that we’re addressing don’t have the same visibility here as other industries. As such, we would like to get the attention of the great engineers, product builders, and designers that make up the HackerNoon community. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? Try many things before settling on your professional interests. Don’t forget that you will always have enough time ahead of you, so don’t rush trying to be successful. Have fun while spending your early professional years learning and solving hard problems with great people. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? Don’t underestimate the potential complexity in seemingly simple problems. LINK to City Award Page with your company listed. Startup of the Year

Startup Interview with Ato Kasymov, CEO & Co-founder of Zentist

An explanation of benefits (EOB) details a patient’s coverage, the treatment they have received, what the payer covered and did not cover, as well as other pertinent details. While it is not a bill, it is similar to an itemized invoice. With different patients utilizing different insurance companies, larger dental practices, in particular, can become quickly consumed in wrangling data. Traditionally, specialists manually gather and compile this information from each individual insurance portal. It must be done daily and requires managing multiple secure log-ins in addition to the data being downloaded. After each piece of the EOB puzzle is gathered, it then must be read and sorted, and formats converted where necessary – this may include scanning and uploading digital versions of hard copy documents. The specialist then needs to account for full and partial payments, and appropriately credit patient accounts - all manually. The process then begins again for the next patient.** ** AI can provide an automated solution to this time-consuming and inefficient process. It would parse EOB continuously and securely, accessing individual insurance portals, pulling EOBs, and recreating them in one, standard, user-friendly format. Specialists could then access it at any time via a dashboard. ** ** Full payments, partial payments, and denials could be clearly delineated with the sum of total daily reports available to specialists for tracking. When access to practice management software is provided, AI that parses EOB might even automatically write-back payment postings to patient accounts. For high-volume organizations, EOB data could also be provided in JSON and CSV formats, expanding automation possibilities.** ** The key is in utilizing artificial intelligence to identify the appropriate data from the top 25 insurance payor EOBs with a suitably high degree of confidence. Offering documents in multiple format options would also speed optimization.** ** The benefits of AI replacing manual work include reducing the associated effort, handling time, and cost while increasing work quality ** ** (Pragya Jain, American University, February 18, 2021, AI and the Future of Work in the United States). Additionally, exposure of confidential patient information would be significantly reduced, making it easier for a practice to maintain compliance with The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Streamlining complex administrative tasks has profound implications for patient care. Technologies like AI, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) could parse EOB for dental practices and reduce the time spent on clerical tasks, freeing practice staff from an endless cycle of paperwork. By Ato Kasymov, CEO of Zentist ** **

AI-Driven EOB (Explanation of Benefits) in Healthcare To Declutter Clerical Work: An Introduction

Despite major technological advancements in the healthcare sector, dentistry is still largely a manual practice with crucial administrative functions relying heavily on human interaction and input. This aspect will continue to change drastically as technology advances. One area that will significantly impact how practices function is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA uses artificial intelligence to automate tasks that are repetitive and rule-based. RPA can perform these processes at high speeds with an extremely low rate of errors, making it popular in the business world. While treating patients is the core of any dental practice, many dentists are also business owners and responsible for the administrative side of their offices. Dentists and staff must devote precious time and resources to creating, tracking, and managing patient records. This is in addition to setting and managing appointments, billing, insurance authorizations, and more. Many of these tasks are ideally suited for RPA technology. RPA is designed to address the labor-intensive and repetitive aspects of those jobs. By eliminating repetitive tasks through automation (i.e., RPA bots), dental practices can: • reduce manual effort • increase efficiency • ultimately improve patient care by freeing clinical providers from administrative distractions With RPA software solutions from emerging tech startups, large amounts of manual back-office work can be automated quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. This means dentists can focus on patients instead of paperwork, increasing efficiency and productivity while minimizing errors. RPA is poised to make a major impact on the dental industry. It will not only improve productivity but also increase the quality of services, and provide companies with greater data management capabilities without affecting care. If you are in the dental industry, now is the time to consider RPA technologies. Manuchehr Kurbonali, Co-Founder Zentist

Brief Thoughts on the Benefits of RPA in Dentistry

Let's learn about via these 46 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Insurance /Learn Repo 1. Allstate Accused of Overcharging Loyal California Customers $1 Billion Allstate, the insurance company, has been accused of overcharging customers in California. 2. If You Do Not Report Your Gun Stolen or Missing You Can Held Liable For Crimes the Gun is Used For Crimes committed with stolen guns that were not reported remain liable for property damage etc. 3. The Insurers' Dilemma: Balancing Consumer Demands and Legacy Conventions In an era of rapidly changing technology, the greatest challenge facing the insurance industry is its ability to keep up with consumer demand. 4. Top 3 Benefits of Insurance Data Analytics The Importance of data analytics and data-driven decisions across the board and in this case insurance data. 5. "Insurers Miss Out On Millions Of Dollars In Business", Manuel San Miguel, Ignatica CEO Ignatica CEO and Co-Founder Manuel San Miguel discusses why he founded the company, AI and Machine Learning and why he should have gone to Japan sooner. 6. The Social Impact of Mixing Business and Medicine COVID-19 has been hitting the healthcare system pretty hard these last few weeks. In U.S. hospitals they are now facing critical shortages of equipment. As of the end of March, nearly 1 in 4 hospitals have fewer than 100 N95 masks on hand and 1 in 5 reports immediate need for more ventilators. Already back in February, the FDA reported shortages in drugs related to coronavirus. 7. A Guide to HIPAA Compliance in 2021 & Its Benefits Following HIPAA laws provides a higher level of safety for your corporation and its leaders. 8. The Perks and Obstacles of AI Adoption in Insurance Imagine that you are a leader at an insurance company. You know that artificial intelligence (AI) will give you a competitive edge and have decided to invest. 9. The Glorious Return of the Conference: Highlights from My First Tech Conference in 2 Years As the world reopens, it's becoming evident that the new Insuretechs don’t see what they are doing as disruption but as an evolution of their strategies. 10. What Are The Advantages Of Usage-Based Car Insurance? In recent years, Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) has become one of the most talked-about technologies in the automotive insurance industry - and for good reason. 11. A Digital-First Approach Could Take the Headaches Away from Buying Insurance A deep dive into major tech-driven changes within the legacy insurance industry. 12. Startup Interview with Ato Kasymov, CEO & Co-founder of Zentist 13. How To Be a Responsible Employer and a Leader in Times of Workplace Crisis Based on the type of work you are doing and the capacity in which your workers operate, any or more of the following occupational injuries can occur to your employees. 14. "All DeFi Applications Are Shooting For The Sky But no One is Wearing a Parachute" - Allan Henders There is a lot to take away from the price performance of the digital asset market in 2020. One of such is that the concept of bitcoin halving, as expected, is a major contributing factor to the success of the bitcoin market and has eventually delivered the level of price swings projected during the pre-halving days. Another is that DeFi is perhaps the most potent application of cryptocurrency technology, which makes it the most plausible instigator of the next wave of growth. In the months following the global market crash, the DeFi landscape has attracted around $14 billion worth of capital. Why is this so? 15. Can Robots Manage Health Benefits? In an attempt to manage soaring health care costs, some government officials and health care companies are turning to algorithms to determine how to allocate limited benefits, who to provide care to first, or whether a person should receive care at all. 16. Insurance for Digital Assets Can Help to Protect Users in the Crypto Space Cryptocurrency insurance can be instrumental in reducing the losses that come with engaging in the crypto market. 17. Fintech Is Dead: All Hail Insurtech Wall Street. Tokyo. London. Shanghai. Hong Kong. 18. How I can Save my Insurance Firm During Disaster? Natural disasters are unpredictable that has the ability to destruct the
globe entirely. It has so much force that even giant construction can
get into the ground in seconds, imagine where humans would go. In
such scenarios, one should stay full secure but preparedness is the
only way to combat a natural disaster. 19. What Does 2021 Hold For Insurance on The Blockchain? Blockchain has seen multiple use cases over the years, from simple payment coins to tokenizing art. But there is a class of projects aiming to build solutions to last over the years, with a level of complexity rivaling traditional business and financial structures. 20. Insure your Bitcoin with Options [A How-To Guide] 21. Technology Is Transforming The Auto Insurance Industry Faster Than We Know It Car insurance is about as dull as things can get, right? WRONG. In the dawn of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics, just about every industry is undergoing huge transformation - and the insurance industry is no different. For instance, auto-reminders are now in place so clients can have a peace of mind - one of the many ways technology affords us more convenience. 22. Guide to Online Liability Insurance Application Thinking of applying for liability insurance for your business online? Congratulations, you have come to the right place! We will take you through each step of the process, so you know exactly what to expect when you apply online. 23. Cryptocurrency Insurance Can Protect You Against Hacks [Infographic] Crypto insurance is worth checking out in order to protect your cryptocurrency gains in the market. 24. Unlocking the Power of Artificial Intelligence in the Insurance Industry Today, artificial intelligence (AI) has barely begun to scratch the surface of the insurance sector. Here are a few of the most AI-friendly applications. 25. How Can Insurance Companies Pivot To A Digital-First Future With Technology? The future of the insurance industry looks bright with insurance technology trends such as AI, ML, cloud computing, hyper-automation and APIs on the rise. 26. A Buyer's Guide To Cyber Insurance, Cyber Liability, and Fraud Protection Cyber insurance can be a great way to protect your company against cybersecurity risks like fraud. But what are you liable for and what does insurance cover? 27. RPA in Insurance: Your Complete Guide 28. Unemployment Insurance Fraud Rose During the Pandemic A ProPublica investigation reveals that much of the fraud has been organized — both in the U.S. and abroad. 29. Did Insurance Companies Benefit From COVID-19? Lewis Carroll – author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – once wrote, “every story has a moral you just need to be clever enough to find it.” The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, has taught us that things can always take an unexpected turn. The question then emerges, how can one protect against this kind of event? The answer is very simple – insurance. 30. Providing Decentralized Insurance Services Worldwide with Hybrid Smart Contracts In this piece, the CTO of Etherisc discusses the central role that hybrid smart contracts and oracles play in enabling parametric insurance products on-chain 31. "Be ready to fire youself," advised Markus Wunsch, Executive Chairman at Mount Wish Mount Wish was nominated as one of the best startups in New York City in Startups of the Year hosted by HackerNoon. 32. 4 Challenges Of Implementing AI In The Insurance Industry and How To Overcome Them AI in insurance comes with its set of challenges that can be pivoted into opportunities. Read all about it here. 33. Implementing a Bridge Between Next-Gen Insurance Claims and Exceptional Customer Service In the insurance sector, customer service takes on multiple roles and features at various touchpoints. 34. Hacking Auto Insurance: Are Givebacks a Good Deal? COVID-19 has changed the way many of us live our lives as stores, restaurants, and more have begun closing up shop, causing many to lose their jobs or start working from home. With millions now stuck in their homes, people are driving much less. Less driving means fewer low-speed accidents, and fewer incidents of aggressive acceleration. Insurance companies have started to give back to their customers to help them financially through the pandemic. Insurance companies are offering financial assistance and more flexible payment programs, penalty-free grace period for late payments, to pause cancellation due to non-payment, and waive deductibles for commuting healthcare workers. In response to the sharp decrease in Americans’ driving mileage, some of the nation’s largest insurers have begun to refund auto insurance premiums. Companies such as Allstate, Geico, Progressive, and StateFarm have returned a total of $14 billion to policyholders. 35. Drones Will Change The Insurance Industry It is never too early to be thinking about the future. And if you are thinking about the future, think about drones. 36. How Self-Driving Cars Will Change the Auto Insurance Industry Welcome to the dawn of the self-driving car era, and a subsequent emerging challenge: how to insure them. 37. Startup Largo Coin Found a Solution to Reduce Investment Risks Largo Coin Limited has launched a blockchain-enabled warranty service targeted at securing private investors’ funds. This project looks to partner with startups and established firms by providing a trustless investment relations solution. 38. Founder Interviews: Lingke Wang of Ethos Lingke Wang and the Ethos team have recently raised over $46 million in order to simplify and modernize the archaic life insurance industry. 39. The Defi Ecosystem: Risk Reduction by Defi Insurance Everything you need to know about DeFi insurance 40. Hacking Better Solutions With AI Powered Insurance Verification A look at how improving the healthcare insurance data capture system will improve through OCR and AI card scan. 41. Research: Organizational AI Adoption in the Insurance Industry Executive Summary 42. Insurance and Blockchain: An A-Z Guide The insurance industry is a huge market. In the United States, in 2019, the volume of paid insurance premiums amounted to a trillion dollars. However, despite such volumes, the industry is experiencing great difficulties, because of which insurance companies are losing more than $100 billion every year. 43. 12 Years of Blockchain: Where Are The Applications? There were a lot of talking about where and how blockchain is suitable. Attempting to stick the blockchain everywhere and to everything is a parody. 44. Is Cyber Insurance Worthwhile? A cyber attack can cost a business everything. Cyber insurance isn’t a bulletproof shield, so is it worth it? 45. Allstate's Car Insurance Algorithm: How Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders Seven years ago, Allstate Corporation told Maryland regulators it was time to update its auto insurance rates. The insurer said its new, sophisticated risk analysis showed it was charging nearly all of its 93,000 Maryland customers outdated premiums. Some of the old rates were off by miles. One 36-year-old man from Prince George’s County, Md., who Allstate said in public records should have been paying $3,750 every six months, was instead being charged twice that, more than $7,500. Other customers were paying hundreds or thousands of dollars less than they should have been, based on Allstate’s new calculation of the risk that they would file a claim. 46. Allstate's Car Insurance Algorithm: How Insurance Algorithm Was Analyzed State regulators and consumer advocacy groups have scrutinized Allstate Corporation’s use of big data and personalized pricing in the way it calculates how much the company charges its private auto insurance customers. Thank you for checking out the 46 most read stories about Insurance on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

46 Stories To Learn About Insurance

213 Stories To Learn About Writing Prompts

240 Stories To Learn About Startups Of The Year

123 Stories To Learn About Healthtech

Meet the Winners of Startups in North and Central America

Thank you to the problem solvers who campaigned extra hard in the first-ever competition! HackerNoon Startups of the Year focuses on recognizing the passion and stamina of those willing to find and create effective tech solutions for their cities. HackerNoon’s Startups of the Year To see who is a winner in each respective city, visit and pick a city. The name at the top of the list is the winner. (Awards, where cheaters were caught, are under review.) startups.hackernoon.com From all of us at , thank YOU for your excellent campaign perseverance🥺! We look forward to seeing you again in the 2022 campaign (stay tuned 😉)! HackerNoon Without further adieu, let us kick off by sharing the cities with top votes per region for 2021 🎉 . our series of Best Startups of the Year Stay tuned for the rest of the winners per region to be over the course of this week (Feb 14, 2022). announced North and Central America America is the concrete jungle where dreams are made of, the world’s capital of fashion, showbiz, business, major industry, etc., and surely, of Startups! Representing , we have: North and Central America (14,563 votes): Winner: Boulder Bury.com (10,521 votes) - Winner: New York City Hum Capital (7,987 votes) - Winner: San Francisco Zentist (7,713 votes) - Winner: Redwood City TigerGraph (469 votes) - Winner: Los Altos Stobox To see more awards in this region please click here. Europe Charming, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. There are many beautiful words used to describe this region. With its eccentric vibe, is also a place where new Startups thrive. Europe Representing Europe we have: (10, 010 votes) - Winner: Belfast Bob & Berts (5, 066 votes) - Winner: Ghent WeGroup (4, 712 votes) - Winner: Porto TAIKAI (3, 779 votes) - Winner: City of London Crypto Quantique To see more awards in this region please click here. Oceania The heat, the beaches, roaming kangaroos, or tarantulas? No. Startups! Representing the region of are: Oceania (1, 011 votes) - Winner: Sydney shotstack (430 votes) - Winner: Melbourne Doohly (118 votes) - Winner: Gold Coast Easil (76 votes) - Winner: Tauranga LawVu (40 votes) - Winner: Western Junction Today We Learned To see more awards in this region please click here. Asia Diverse in both ethnicity and culture, known for exotic sceneries as well as friendly people. Many Asian countries are on the verge of mass globalization and modernization. These fast-developing economies give way for many potential Startups. We present, for : Asia (12, 686 votes) - Winner: Singapore Cake DeFi (3,355 votes) - Winners: and (It’s a tie, we’re working on it!) Tel Aviv Applitools hyro (2, 402 votes) - Winner: Beirut Hovi Digital Lab (1.006 votes) - Winner: Hyderabad Quixy (756 votes) - Winner: Hanoi DeFi For You To see more city awards in this region please click here. Africa The second biggest continent in the world, home to many big animals, the longest river in the world AND the largest desert in the world. is known for many big things and sure enough, big Startups. Africa Representing Africa, we have: (884 votes) - Winner: Johannesburg MiBRAND (804 votes) - Winner: Lagos Goodtalent (526 votes) - Winner: Cape Town Revix (420 votes) - Winner: Lusaka ComGrow (224 votes) - Winner: Nairobi UTU To see more city awards in this region please click here. South America “South America is the land of the extreme.” - National Geographic Extremely beautiful people? Yes. Extremely worth-noticeable Startups? Hell yeah! We proudly present, Startups in : South America (217 votes ) - Winner: São Carlos Predify (193 votes) - Winner: Belo Horizonte CM Technologia (106 votes) - Winner: Porto Alegre Privacy Tools (82 votes) - Winner: Quito Agrodemanda (55 votes) -Winner: Rio De Janeiro Bybrand To see more city awards in this region please click here. Once again, and to all of the top Startups of each region this year! HUGE CONGRATULATIONS BIG PROPS The whole team at would like to thank you for your excellent campaign perseverance and we look forward to seeing you in the 2022 campaign. HackerNoon As part of honoring your participation, we will continue to host your company in this directory until further notice ( for legal reasons we hesitate to say ‘forever’..but pretty much forever).  As traffic is directed to the site, it will act as a promotional platform for your company. Have a great Valentine’s Day, HackerNoon loves y’all <3 More Information: If you’re a winner, please answer ! If you’re a reader, participant, just a curious individual, consider answering one of our interviews . this interview here Read the FAQs about or . Startups here here To see all of the winners you may visit , pick any city and view the name that appears at the top. this site If you’re interested in partnering with us, we invite you to look through some of these or reach out to our business department. unique sponsorship options Perhaps creating your very own tickles your fancy or maybe you have a whole new idea for how we can partner! writing contest Thank you to all of our sponsors! We truly appreciate your contribution to the tech world and thus the future! The Startups Awards are sponsored by: , , , , , , , , , , Blockster Brex FreeCodeCamp LaunchDarkly Coil Udacity Udemy Vercel Asia Pacific Transgender Network Bybit Everscale Network This post was written by Tuan Anh Vu. If you have any questions or concerns or would like to report a discrepancy please email ellen@hackernoon.com.

To the Winners of #Startups2021, With Love:

Everything I’ve read about blog posts says I need a large image to start. So, here goes… First, I must say I’m quite humbled that anyone cared to read . I approached that last entry with a perspective that a couple dozen people would read it over the course of a few weeks, if that. As of writing this, it’s sitting at over 2,000 reads, several Twitter shares including a Microsoft MVP, an engineer on the Entity Framework team, and a co-worker asking if that was actually me out of the blue. Takeaways: check the ‘tude, and refine the message. my first blog So, to the point. My main impression from the last article is that there’s a strong thirst for good Entity Framework resources. The issues are well-known, the frustrations are felt by many, and people want to know what to do. That’s what this entry is about. Step 0) Generation Brass tacks time; here are the packages I’ll be working with. (TLDR; if you want to play with it yourself.) GitHub repo The main package that brings in the EF Core runtime as well as the components needed to work with SQL Server. Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer Provides InMemory support allowing us to do easy as pie mocking. It should be noted, though, that it doesn’t enforce relational constraints. Since its most popular scenario so far is with testing, that’s not an issue since the whole point of tests is to verify things. Even so, the capability for a fast, albeit volatile, memory database is very much there. Imagination is the only real limit. Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.InMemory These are necessary to reverse engineer an existing database which is my preferred approach. I much prefer to work with SQL Server in all it’s ugly glory. Being able to define what you want your database to be (re: Let the Database be a Database) and letting the runtime suck in all the detail it can handle is a quick way to ensure you’re getting the most out of your code-first implementation. New version of EF comes out? Import it again. But, this is like buying a suit at a store. It’ll definitely work. It’ll even look good, but it will need some tailoring, and cufflinks are separate. In an actual product, remember that partials are your friend. Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer.Design Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools Providing the most unique feature is the .Net Reactive Extensions. These can be used in tons of different ways, but will work for demonstrating ETL capabilities. System.Reactive EF is still lacking in declarative actions that issue commands at the data store. This isn’t bad as being agnostic requires certain trade offs. Yet, EF is extensible which is what lets products like this exist. This product lets us have Update and Delete capabilities without needing to interact with entities at all. The Z libraries are solid, but I do have a problem with the pricing of their commercial bulk insert offering. What I’ll show here will get you most of what their bulk insert offering does albeit probably not as polished. This is a free blog, after all. Z.EntityFramework.Plus.EFCore You can install these with the following line: “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer”, “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.InMemory”, “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer.Design”, “Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools”, “System.Reactive”, “Z.EntityFramework.Plus.EFCore” | foreach {Install-Package $_} Unfortunately, the take with .Net Core packages means all that will bloat to like 70 packages total with all its dependencies. To match the database I’ll be using, run the script . The point of this entry isn’t to go over the schema aspects but how Entity Framework can live in an application and how we can interact with it without it being a kludgey nightmare. Alas, I loathe two table databases “examples” with a passion. EfStore.create.sql The command I used to import the EfStore database is the following: Scaffold-DbContext “Server=(local);Database=EfStore;Trusted_Connection=True;” Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer -OutputDir StoreData Since partials our friends, lets partial out a shard of the context as {context_name}.Customizations.cs. Because we do this, we should watch out for the pregenerated OnConfiguring method in the context. You can delete this. are _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Step 1) Isolation I completely agree with the notion that we shouldn’t need to litter our code with DbContext references. Why would that ever be necessary? Yet, I still stand by my statement that the repository pattern is a throne of lies. It goes too far and lobotomizes Entity Framework’s potential. The primary point of contact can take many forms. In my example, since I only work with a SQL Server store, I called it . In an application dealing with many providers, it could likely become a factory or some sort of look up that would know how to expose the DbContext to the caller. DataService _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework As you can wrap the DbContext, you can also wrap the DbContextOptionsBuilder. I call this the . Yes, I do some implicit operator overloading to let the naked DbContextOptionsBuilder fit into the DataService’s methods without needing to do explicit casting and having it look weird, but it works well for conceptual demo purposes. In a production application you should put this away in a factory that the service calls or can be passed in if you want to invert your dependency. DataOptionsBuilder _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework After these, you have all the layering you need between your application and Entity Framework. You can completely rip it out and as long as the contracts remain the same, you don’t need to make any changes to your application code. This also shows why I had the ire I did in my prior blog entry. You don’t need these cookie cutter pieces dotting your applications like minefields for every little facet you want to expose. Save yourself some work and use the framework to your advantage. Granted, some people don’t like tying themselves too much to a particular framework. Protip: you lost that battle like five times over by time you write “hello, world” in a .net console app. If you instead want to be able copy/paste (with little modification) from one framework to another, there’s still no reason you can’t do that. Such a thing takes an incredible amount of work no matter what even if you only ever code in primitives and arrays. Things like this also make me angry at Visual Studio WCF proxy generation. Rolling a manual proxy factory is easy, gets you greater fidelity, and is much more consistent not to mention much lighter than the half dozen files Visual Studio plops into your solution. I digress. Step 2) Extension You might think the above is great alone. You have Entity Framework, and it’s not littering your code like your rude friend who never cleans up after himself when he visits. Yet, it’s wholly useless for what we need and doesn’t hold up to the claims I made in the last post. For that we need two things to meet the criteria I set out. The first part of this, , delivers a quality of life component in ClearCache methods and the show horse that destroys “EF can’t” claims, BulkInsert. The methods are straight-forward. One takes a selector so you can choose what to get rid of. The other clears everything. DbContextExtensions ClearCache _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Looking at the code you might go “but hoagsie, bro, you said IEnumerable was bad.” No, I didn’t. I said to break the love affair with it. We don’t want to cart around a collection of objects that might be thousands or millions of items large. We can still delay enumeration until we actually want to do something with it which is the purpose of IEnumerable. Also, this reinforces an important implicit paradigm I’m advocating: IQueryable is for fetching data and messing with it mid-execution whereas IEnumerable is for managing data we already have and can work with it in a simple manner. “But hoagsie, bro, don’t repos do that?” No, they don’t. As I illustrated in my last entry, repositories impose restrictions upon the data you serve back to the application and are resistant to change. Also, while today you need to select some products but do some processing on all them in another module, if a junior developer needs to refactor that module four months later to skip the first 30 for whatever reason, the IQueryable can roll with this. Repositories can’t unless you go back and change the part that calls the repository. The method works with SqlBulkCopy as I espoused. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Something that might be a surprise is the dedicated SqlConnection I setup for it. In my tests, the bulk copy object kept closing the underlying connection causing issues. So, we can create another connection. It is still streamed data so you can still shovel tons of data through it and you won’t be creating several connections. You have two and that’s it. BulkInsert The crème de la crème of the BulkInsert is what the give us. They provide a “just a few lines” way to create powerful, expressive transformations to objects that stream through the method. You have to be mindful of what you do in the transformation or else you’ll still put your performance in the trash. Still, I’ve seen this chew through records like nobody’s . Put the application that uses this on the close to the database to cut latency and watch it scream. Reactive Extensions business network I also provided a quick and dirty to provide a way to hook into the update notifications the SqlBulkCopy object provides. BulkHelper _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Lastly, the part that ties the implementation together is the . This lets the IDataReader overload of the bulk copy object understand our IQueryables and can subsequently handle anything we throw at it. QueryableDataReader _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework Last but not least, we have our . These utilize the Z lib to gracefully wrap the IQueryableExtensions Where(Expression<Func<TEntity, bool>>).Update(Expression<Func<TEntity, TEntity>>) and Where(Expression<Func<TEntity, bool>>).Delete() features of the package without betraying it comes from somewhere else. _BetterEntityFramework - Some examples on how to more cleanly work with Entity Framework_github.com hoagsie/BetterEntityFramework With these extensions, the code can still be almost completely ignorant of Entity Framework and the Z lib. Let’s look at the using block in Program.cs. using System.Linq;using System.Reactive;using BetterEntityFramework.Extensions;using BetterEntityFramework.StoreData;using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;using Data = BetterEntityFramework.DataService;using IsolationLevel = System.Data.IsolationLevel; The reason the “using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;” line is in there is because I call out to the builder options to show how we can interact with them. Putting that in a factory or a default provider implementation would leave the application aspects of the code 100% ignorant of what’s going on. Note that this is different from not pretending Entity Framework isn’t a dependency. It is. It always has been even with repositories. But, we don’t need to think about it and can let other components manage those concerns for us. That’s what it’s all about. only I did not create a “working” demo but instead opted for a recipe like scramble of examples so you can pick and choose and adapt the components to whatever you’d want to do without needing to scrape out my scenario code. Step 3) Live long and prosper

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