ADO.NET Architecture

ADO.NET introduces a new data architecture that is tuned for building large, high-performance Web applications, but which is different from the ADO architecture that Windows developers have come to know.

Key Components

The three key components of ADO.NET work together to retrieve data from databases, allow applications to modify that data, and then update the data back to the original databases.

DataSet. The DataSet allows the developer to manipulate and modify data, regardless of where the data came from. It is an in-memory representation of data, which means that once a query is executed and the data is returned, the results are stored completely in memory unless the programmer explicitly chooses to write them to disk. In-memory storage makes application performance more predictable because developers do not have to worry that accessing a particular row of data might inadvertently trigger a call back to the original database. In addition, a DataSet can be filled from multiple sources. For instance, a single DataSet can contain data from a Customer table from one database, an Orders table from another database, and an OrderDetails table from a third.