Is there such a thing as a manager design pattern?

Solution 1:

Sounds like you're after the mediator pattern - which can be thought of as a 'manager' of the objects that it deals with.

Solution 2:

In many systems, a manager is also a facade for a sub-system, and in that scenario it is more of a facade design pattern.

Solution 3:

Data Manager is the implementation of Facade design pastern. It encapsulate the Connection to the database and the transaction scope. It holds all the DAOs or Records (lazy or not lazy) of all the tables it responsible and when he creates one it connects it to the connection and transaction. It can be use as a singleton so you work with one data manager. Data Manager can use cache manager to cache the data that it retrieve from the database and if the same request is issue then it can return the result from the cache.