Design patterns provide proven solutions to real world problems faced in software designs. The Repository pattern is used to decouple the business logic and the data access layers in your application.

In using the Repository design pattern, you can hide the details of how the data is eventually stored or retrieved to and from the data store. This data store can be a database, an xml file, etc.

Cunningham: We've cataloged a huge number of patterns in all areas of software. They are the basis of applied (practical) software architecture. Unfortunately, we are at risk of losing this foundation ...