Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming

Chapter 25. Being Well Connected

Having an SQL Server but not allowing programs to connect to it is the same as not having an SQL Server at all. Sure, we may log in to Management Studio and write queries directly, but the reality is that the vast majority of our users out there never actually see the database directly. They are just using input and reporting screens in some system we've written. (OK, in today's Massively Multiplayer Online world, they could be on a highly scalable gaming system too, but not too many of us are going to work on one of those ....) With this in mind, it probably makes sense to figure out how your application is actually going to talk to the database.

Tons of books out there cover this topic directly (and, outside of a basic connection, it really is a huge topic unto itself), so I'm not even going to attempt to discuss every fine point of every access model in every language. Instead, we're going to address basic concepts and some fundamental issues of performance, memory use, and general best practices. We'll also take a very quick look at the most common data access object models being used with SQL Server today. As I've done with some of the other broad-based topics we spend time with in this book, the idea is to get you some fundamentals in a quick but useful way, and to give you something of a taste of what's involved and what kinds of questions to be asking.

I can't voice strongly enough how much we are just scratching the surface here. This is a ...