OLE DB is as powerful a tool on the client side as ADO.NET is on the server side. But the real strength of the .NET Framework data access solution comes from what it can do with a dataset.

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by Michael L. Perry, president and consultant, Mallard Software Designs Inc. Intel Corp.

In Persistence Pays Off, Part 1: The Server, we created the persistence mechanism for the server side of Laurel, a practical Web application. This application is practical because it has features that make it desirable to use. One of these features is that information is cached on the client, making the program fully functional even when the server cannot be reached.

Because of the decision to cache data, the same care must be taken in designing the client persistence mechanism as for the server. The client does not have the scalability issues that the server does, so it is not quite so sensitive to blocking. However, the client-side cache is structurally more complex than the server-side transaction history, as it has more related tables. On the server, we performed bare-bones ADO to control blocking. But on the client, we will let the .NET Framework help us more, so we can easily handle the complexities of the information model.