Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

The DataSet Component

The DataSet is central to supporting disconnected, distributed data scenarios with ADO.NET. The DataSet is a memory-resident representation of data that provides a consistent relational programming model regardless of the data source. The DataSet represents a complete set of data, including related tables, constraints, and relationships among the tables; basically, it's like having a small relational database residing in memory.

Note

Because the DataSet contains a lot of metadata, you need to be careful about how much data you try to stuff into it, as it consumes memory.

The methods and objects in a DataSet are consistent with those in the relational database model. The DataSet can also persist and reload its contents as XML, and its schema as XSD. It is completely disconnected from any database connections, so it is totally up to you to fill it with whatever data you need in memory.

Ever since ADO.NET 2.0, several new features have been added to the DataSet and the DataTable classes, as well as enhancements to existing features. The features covered in this section are:

• The binary serialization format option
• Additions to make the DataTable more of a standalone object
• The capability to expose DataSet and DataTable data as a stream (DataReader), and to load stream data into a DataSet or DataTable

DataTableCollection

An ADO.NET DataSet contains a collection of zero or more tables represented by DataTable objects. The DataTableCollection contains all ...