Remoting and Datasets

[Kir Birger]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829740 This article would have you use a wrapper class that serializes more nicely than DataSet, and in fact it really does halve the size of the dataset (in serialized form). However, the time it takes to serialize a decently sized dataset 100 times to the time it takes to serialize the surrogate 100 times is 6 seconds to 30... Nonetheless it seems like the overall consensus is that it's good to avoid sending DataSets across remoting and soap. What are your thoughts and solutions on the matter?

[kubben]

I ran into something like this a while back. We had large files that we needed to send across a web service. I wrote an article on the solution I came up with: http://www.codeproject.com/cs/webservices/sending_files_via_webserv.asp[^] Note if you do have a web service some of the new WSE 3.0 allow some pretty nice features for attaching files. It means that WSE 3.0 needs to be installed, but some nice stuff comes with it. Anyway, my article is about files, but you can certainly take other large objects and zip them down and encode them and pass them along a cdata node. Anyway, I don't know if that will help you out or not. Ben

[Kir Birger]

Thanks for your response. I looked at your solution and it may work well enough for files, but in serialization and compression it's really the file type that matters. You created a pseudo-schema, which is almost like a dataset in itself. I'm just trying to find the quickest way to do it. The problem with the Surrogate that MSDN suggests is the large overhead to get to it. A simple object[][] (light but a pain to use) outperforms DataSet and DataSurrogate (zipped and unzipped) significantly on a small number of rows, but as the actual size increases, the difference fades.