Comments on: DataSets are Evil

By: programmer.novice

programmer.novice — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:45:53 +0000

Just read this
Designing N-Tiered Data Access Layer Using Datasets – Part 1
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/080103.htm

So why do you say it’s not possible to do ORM with datasets ?

By: Shey

Shey — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:49:37 +0000

Speaking of commercial realities, you’ll get a web application up much faster with an ORM like castle ActiveRecord then you would with plain datasets.

I don’t agree with your business logic comment, with typed datasets you get type safety but you’re still building a “logic layer” that’s full of “staticy” functions that don’t represent your domain.

With the “logic layer” you lose all the benefits of OOP. Take a look at the onion architecture for comparison:

http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/the-onion-architecture-part-1/

By: Beenish

Beenish — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:35:21 +0000

With .Net 2.0, DataSet does allow you quite alot of things. Strongly typed datasets are already there. And you can definitely bring in a business logic layer will that.

Combining with commercial realities, Dataset does come out to be a winner at many times, OOP classes are quite cumbersome most of the time.

By: Shey

Shey — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:12:15 +0000

Mehroz,

Initially datasets are very easy to use, Microsoft provides a lot of tooling around data sets, but as your application grows larger Datasets require to much maintenance, and make it very difficult to extend your application, for the reasons I mentioned above.

By: Syed Mehroz Alam

Syed Mehroz Alam — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:42:24 +0000

Quote: the energy and time spent creating typed DataSets could be better spent creating domain objects

Strange. I think Visual studio DataSet designer can create typed DataSets in a very less time. In one dataset, you can add multiple tables, relationships and links, table adapters to fill your data in various ways and much more. It also handles the inserts/updates/delets automatically too. I do not have much experience with ORMs but I think DataSets (typed) can be used for a very rapid development.

By: Shey

Shey — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:16:03 +0000

IMHO, the energy and time spent creating typed DataSets could be better spent creating domain objects, with domain objects you have all the benefits of typed DataSets plus extensibility.

By: James Thigpen

James Thigpen — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:32:48 +0000

To be fair, you *can* use strongly typed datasets.

And you can mitigate the schema change ripples to a certain extent by doing “Select dog as dog …”, but that makes your sql gross(er?).

In any case, I mostly agree.