Essential ADO.NET

2.2. Two Patterns of Data Access

Data is no good unless you can access it. As a contrived example, suppose I keep a diary in which I record, among all the facets of my personal life, how much I spent on each purchase in my important role as a consumer. If the Internal Revenue Service wants to know how much I spent on charitable contributions, for example, it does not want me to send in the whole diary. Instead, it wants a summary. Similarly, in the manufacturing and sales industries, businesses and consumers want to track the status of their orders. They want to know, for example, whether an order has been received, processed, manufactured, and shipped.

There are two methods of accessing this data: connected and disconnected. In connected mode, ...