Nigel,
It is true that .NET 2.0's dataset has been really improved from within to
handle greater quantities of data, but the justification of that is the
desire to abuse it as a database. It shouldn't be interpreted as a nod from
Microsoft that a DataSet is okay to abuse as a DataBase. (I am not Microsoft
mind you).
There are a number of reasons for this.
1. First of all, Dataset is guess what - Managed Code, and to send all the
..NET lovers in tailspin, Managed Code can never be as fast and as optimized
as native code. That is reasonable to expect and I am certainly not saying
that unmanaged is better and drop managed code for good - NO WAY, there are
a lot of benefits of using Managed code, but when it comes to raw
performance, Managed code sucks.
2. Secondly, the Garbage collector is that animal that makes things very
very good for 90% of the situations i.e. normal memory usage, but when you
start storing many megabytes or close to a gigabyte of information
completely in RAM - it will actually hurt your application performance. In
those scenarios, you don't want an external policeman who doesn't understand
the specific needs of your app. In that situation, you want fine control on
the memory where you specifiy when it gets cleaned, or serialized to the
disk etc. You need paging mechanisms etc. which are possible to write for
the dataset but are a real royal pain to write and even then they don't work
quite as well as - guess what - native code (i.e. most of what SQL Server).
3. SQL Server and any database comes with a "Query Engine". The number of
optimizations built into that is the work of many Phds (or dudes with
similar smarts and specialization), they have written up SQL Server's query
engine to take advantage of automatic paging, locking algorithms, spilling
over to the disk when needed, "query plans", caching those query plans -
when you compare the object model of a Dataset (or any biz object for that
matter), the comparison is like comparing a candle with the sun.
4. The algorithms in a DataSet is rudimentary, they rely on simple
techniques such as string matching, string manipulation - that level of
simplicity. They work on an "Object structure", every value they access goes
over a dereferenced segment calculation. SQL Server and any standard
database is written with that level of optimization (Not like I have looked
at their code, but it has to be written that way). Maybe in certain
instances DataSet might be smarter than I try to bring out here, but a
DataSet is an in memory object - that is how simple it is. It's just an
"object". It's worse than MS-Access when it comes to managing data for you.
(Don't get me wrong, I still love datasets, I just don't think they replace
databases). Even MS-Access will manage 4 GB, a DataSet doesn't even have a
clear upper limit definied. But of course MS Access isn't an in memory, xml
convertible, serializable in memory cache that lets you extract and merge
changes - so comparing dataset with access is like comparing apples and
oranges (but hey the argument is all about a DataSet is an Orange (in memory
cache), not an Apple (Database)).
5. Lets not forget transactional locks and many other such points, I blogged
about it earlier over here -
http://codebetter.com/blogs/sahil.malik/archive/2005/01/23/47547.aspx
6. Datasets are or any such object - AN IN MEMORY disconnected cache of
data. Being completely in memory lends them to the disadvantage of a 32 bit
OS's 2 GB memory allocation limit, there are ways around that but I
personally see those ways as bandaids rather than a true solution. Secondly
being disconnected leaves you with a WORLD of problems to solve when trying
to persist relational data back into the database. If you think
DataAdapter.Update(Dataset) will save your entire dataset into the database,
and also take care of concurrency issues, and transactional deadlocks - you
are sorely mistaken. A simple 3 table hierarchy will require you to write
pages and pages of code to save properly into the database in every
scenario - it is NOT a trivial task. And then you have to worry about not
sending too much over the wire in web service like environments, so
Merge/GetChanges - and oh lets not forget keeping your disconnected cache
fresh. How do you resolve Deleted Rows? .NET 1.1 leaves you with very few
choices, .NET 2.0 has a new IndexOf method which doesn't work in every
circumstance.
Now of course you could argue that #6 proves that simply don't use a
database, only use a disconnected cache i.e. prevayler etc. For that
argument, re-read items #1 thru 5.
In short, while DataSets will continue to improve, or lets say, they will
continue to try and be as good as a full fledged database is, they will
NEVER reach that point. While even though datasets will improve, who knows
you may even be able to run a SQL Query against them directly, but hey you
could always store a little tiny such database on a RAMDisk, or a memory
mapped file in SQL Server, and pretty much get what you need including the
heavy duty research that has already gone in making "a database".
Again, I strongly and vehemently disagree with an architecture that puts 1
GB data into a DataSet. That is complete stupidity in both .NET 1.1 and 2.0.
Whew .. this was a long reply .. gotta go !!
- Sahil Malik [MVP]
ADO.NET 2.0 book -
http://codebetter.com/blogs/sahil.malik/archive/2005/05/13/63199.aspx
