Serve Dynamic Pages Quickly
Web applications need to insulate the Web server from the data store. VS.NET provides a DataSet class that makes this easy.
by Bill Wagner
Effective n-tier applications require consistent communication between the tiers. The .NET DataSet class helps this communication process by providing mechanisms for manipulating data in a single tier and transferring data between different tiers. In this column, I'll show you some of the ways the DataSet class can help you build a Web application that performs and scales better.
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Technology Toolbox
VB.NET, SQL Server 2000, ASP.NET
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First, a little background on Web application deployment. In a Web application's typical hardware architecture, the data store, Web server, and the client browser all run on different machines (see Figure 1). In fact, Network Address Translation insulates the data store from the Internet; this hides the data store machine from prying eyes on the Internet. Obviously, your Web server must accept requests from the Internet. However, the data store machine should be hidden completely. This set of requirements mandates that your Web server and data store be on different machines. (These requirements aren't a complete security strategy by any means, but they're almost always part of the strategy.)
Much of your design work involves optimizing the communications between these two separate machines. For example, it's likely that many of your end users will request the same or similar data. Caching those results on the Web server saves your application a round trip to the database to deliver the same data. Similarly, your application can allow users to update entries in the data store. In these instances, you'll want to apply many updates in a single batch, rather than as separate database updates.
Before you start designing your own solution to this problem, you should know that the .NET Framework designers have solved it for you already. The DataSet class can serve as a data cache between the data store and your Web server, and it has more features that will help you design high-performance Web applications with large data needs.
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