Real World SharePoint® 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs

Chapter 20. Accessing Sharepoint Data

By Reza Alirezaei

SharePoint 2010 introduces a great deal of new functionality to meet common challenges in working with SharePoint data, particularly with new client-side and server-side data access methods, and the capability to enforce referential integrity between SharePoint lists. To make optimal decisions, you must have a strong understanding of the new options, as well as the trade-offs.

The techniques described in this chapter should underpin most of the things you do in the particular functional area of accessing SharePoint data. This chapter focuses on accessing and consuming data stored in SharePoint, and provides insights into different data access techniques that can be utilized in your SharePoint applications. It also introduces some guidelines and best practices to mitigate the performance degradation when accessing SharePoint data.

DATA MODELING

Typically, when you consider a data model in SharePoint, the starting point is always where you need to store the data. This decision leads to two options:

• Database

• SharePoint lists

Databases can handle advanced data models that carry complex relationships with high availability, and SharePoint lists enable a great experience in the browser. So, the question is, which way do you go?

In SharePoint 2007, if you wanted to implement a data model using a database, generally you had to handle security and CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations yourself, unless you wanted to use the Business Data ...