Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework

ADO.NET DataSets

DataSets are the core of ADO.NET. They are the reason ADO.NET works in a disconnected environment. Basically, a DataSet is an in-memory representation of some data. The representation is in the form of DataTables with columns and rows, just like a table in your database. In most situations, your DataSet will have a similar structure to your database schema; however, this is not a requirement for a DataSet schema. This also holds true for the data source of the DataSet. In most cases, the data source will be your database; however, because DataSets are data-source independent, it could be a non-database source such as an XML file.

In ADO, data was represented as a single table in a recordset. In ADO.NET, the data is represented ...