Essential ADO.NET

4.3. Defining an Information Schema

As you've seen throughout this chapter, DataSet is very similar to an in-memory relational database. In fact, it's so similar that I end this chapter by discussing a way to produce the “standard” SQL-99 information schema views from a DataSet. You remember that the SQL-99 (and before it, SQL-92) information schema is simply a standard way for a database to expose metadata about its objects. The standard information schema defines views that enumerate what it considers to be standard database objects, such as tables, columns, stored procedures, and so on, and standard information that could be exposed about them. Chapter 3 shows how this information is retrieved by the OleDb data provider (using Connection.GetSchemaTable ...