Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2008 - (Page 34)

d12espo_p5db 10/10/08 9:54 AM Page 34 Instantly Search Terabytes of Text N dozens of indexed, unindexed, fielded data and full-text search options (including Unicode support for hundreds of international languages) N file parsers / converters for The Entity Framework and .NET 3.5 SP1 With the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Microsoft officially introduced Version 1.0 of ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) with a similar tool—LINQ-to-Entities. Both LINQ-to-SQL and Entity Framework are O/RM tools, though with different flavors and scopes. The Entity Framework is Microsoft’s fully fledged O/RM tool that, in terms of features, may compete with commercial and open-source products such as NHibernate and LLBLGen Pro. LINQ-to-Entities is just the query language that maps an Entity Framework entity model to a LINQ syntax. EF is the big brother of LINQ-to-SQL. If you find that EF works for you, you might just want to opt for that and skip over LINQ-to-SQL. Even in this case, though, the considerations we made here about T-SQL remain largely valid. —D.E. hit-highlighted display of all popular file types N Spider supports static and dynamic web data; highlights hits while displaying links, formatting and images intact N API supports .NET, C++, Java, databases, etc. New .NET Spider API of those methods, you can specify your own T-SQL code for update operations. Here’s an example: h Spider Desktop wit h Spider Network wit CD/DVDs Publish for ider Web with Sp Win & .NET Engine for Linux Engine for partial void DeleteCustomer(Customer instance) { this.ExecuteCommand("DELETE FROM customers WHERE customerid=@id", just run a plain T-SQL query using ADO.NET commands and objects. LINQ and LINQ-toSQL are useful and helpful, but they’re just high-level tools built on top of ADO.NET. Conclusion LINQ-to-SQL can definitely let you do your database stuff without knowing much about T-SQL and SQL Server. For example, LINQto-SQL is an excellent shortcut for, say, developers with an Oracle background. At the same time, LINQ-to-SQL is a technology open enough to let SQL Server experts express their skills and ability and do things the way they want. LINQ is the query language and LINQ-to-SQL is an autogenerated object model based on a SQL Server table that can be queried using LINQ. As a whole, LINQ-to-SQL looks like a simple and SQL Server-specific O/RM tool capable of offering CRUD and query services with support for transactions and concurrency. To answer the initial question—are LINQ-toSQL and T-SQL friends or enemies? They’re not certainly enemies. So are they friends? LINQ-to-SQL certainly has an intimate knowledge of T-SQL, but the T-SQL it produces may not be optimal in all situations. The number of situations where this happens is really few. You should use LINQ-toSQL extensively before you can safely conclude that it doesn’t work for you. DDJ New 64-bit instance.CustomerID); } The Smart Choice for Text Retrieval ® since 1991 N “Bottom line: dtSearch manages a terabyte of text in a single index and returns results in less than a second” – InfoWorld N “For combing through large amounts Needless to say, you can use stored procedures here as well. Another bunch of extensibility methods exist to let you validate changes entered into entity classes such as Customer and Order. partial void OnLoaded(); partial void OnValidate(System.Data.Linq .ChangeAction action); partial void OnCreated(); partial void OnCustomerIDChanging(string value); partial void OnCustomerIDChanged(); of data,” dtSearch “leads the market” – Network Computing N dtSearch “covers all data sources powerful Web-based engines”– eWEEK N dtSearch “searches at blazing speeds” – Computer Reseller News Test Center See www.dtsearch.com for hundreds more reviews, and hundreds of developer case studies Contact dtSearch for fully-functional evaluations 1-800-IT-FINDS www.dtsearch.com 34 For each property, you find a pair of OnXxxChanging and OnXxxChanged methods to let you control what happens before and after the assignment of a value to a property. Finally, what if you need to run a complex query and find out that the LINQ-toSQL autogenerated T-SQL is not the best possible? How can you replace a query? You Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l December 2008 http://www.dtsearch.com http://www.dtsearch.com http://www.dtsearch.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Conversations The Man Who Sold the Sky Performance on Rails LINQ-to-SQL and T-SQL A Remote Java RMI Registry Beyond B-Trees File Descriptors and Multithreaded Programs Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.