The document discusses designing a persistence framework using patterns. It describes persistent objects that survive process termination and storage mechanisms like object and relational databases. A persistence framework provides functions to store/retrieve objects and commit/rollback transactions. Key concepts covered include mapping objects to tables, object identity, materialization/dematerialization, caches, and transactions. Common patterns used in persistence frameworks are also described, such as representing objects as tables, the database mapper pattern, template method for caching, and the state pattern for transaction management.