I'm trying to learn more about data access and the Entity Framework. My goal is to have a "provider independent" data access layer (to be able to switch easily e.g. from SQL Server to MySQL or vice versa), and since the EF is supposed to be provider independent it seems like a good way to go. But how do you use this provider independence? I mean, I was expecting to be able to sort of "program to an interface", and then just be able to switch database provider. But as far as I can tell I'm only getting a concrete type to program against, an "Entities" class, e.g. in my case it is: UserDBEntities _context = new UserDBEntities();

What I would have expected to be able to switch provider easily was to have an interface e.g. like IEntities _context = new UserDBEntities(); Sort of like I can do with datasets... But maybe that isn't how it works at all with EF? Or do you just switch provider in the connectionstring, and the model stays the same??

Please remember that I'm a complete newbie at this EF, and rather inexperienced with databases in general, so I would really appreciate if you could be as clear as possible :-)