Pretty darn close. You’re thinking of data mapper.
http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/dataMapper.html
In software engineering, the data mapper pattern is an architectural pattern. It was named by Martin Fowler in his 2003 book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. The interface of an object conforming to this pattern would include functions such as Create, Read, Update, and Delete, that operate on objects that represent domain entity types in a data store.
A Data Mapper is a Data Access Layer that performs bidirectional transfer of data between a persistent data store (often a relatio...
I think it’s very much worth it, yes. A competing pattern called active record is coming back in vogue (somewhat) thanks to Laravel, but I think data mapper is better.