Chapter 12. Working with SQL Server
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
How to use SQL Server Compact to create local copies of your SQL Server databases to create a local cache
How to use SQL Server Compact and the Sync Framework to create a local synchronized cache of your SQL Server databases
How to use SQL Server's XML features to return data as XML
How to create CLR objects within your SQL Server databases
How to create and use WCF Data Services to expose your data as a RESTful service
Most of the relationship between a developer and SQL Server relates to querying or saving data, and we've spent the last couple of chapters examining the two main ways of doing this with Visual Basic. However, Visual Studio 2010 provides a few other ways to work with databases: SQL Server Compact, SQL CLR, and WCF Data Services.
While Visual Basic has always included tools for working with the various server editions and versions of SQL Server, there exists a much smaller version: SQL Server Compact. SQL Server Compact is a lightweight version of the database that requires minimal installation and configuration to use. It runs on both Windows and devices running Windows CE. SQL Server Compact is particularly well suited for creating local caches of a larger remote database, which may be used to improve performance when querying rarely changing tables or for the creation of partially connected solutions when working with data. In combination with various synchronization scenarios, SQL Server Compact ...
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