Day 12. Using Data Adapters

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On Day 1, "ADO.NET in Perspective," you learned how ADO.NET was designed with modern distributed applications in mind. One of the primary architectures used in these types of applications entails the use of disconnected data. In this book, we've spent a great deal of time discussing the DataSet class and how it can be used to store and work with disconnected data. However, in enterprise applications, the most common source for, and the destination of, that data is a persistent store such as SQL Server or Oracle. The data adapter is the component of the .NET Data Provider that moves data into and out of the DataSet . Data adapters are classes implemented by the provider that typically derive from DbDataAdapter and inherit the IDbDataAdapter interface.

Although you've run across data adapters in the previous days, today you'll explore data adapters in detail. Specifically, you'll focus on the following concepts:

• How the data adapter fills a DataSet and what rules it follows when doing so

• How to control the amount of data read into a DataSet

• How data adapters synchronize the contents of a DataSet with a data store

• How to handle issues of concurrency and isolation with data adapters

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