To use DataSets or not. What to do? [closed]

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I am writing a small c# database application that will store sports statistics. There will be about 7 tables in the local sdf file that will store the data. One table for storing the player details, another table to store the game info and another table that will store the the actual stats from the game using the playerid and gameid as foreign keys. I personally see this as a small database as it will only grow by about 30 entries per week. The end result of this is to be about to pull reports out of the collected stats.

I am a little confused as to which way to access the data in the database. Datasets look ok, but when i want queries to access multiple tables or use the WHERE function in the query, things get a little troublesome. I was thinking of just directly accessing the database with out the need for datasets.

Opinions on the best options are appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Datasets area relatively old technology which is steadily being replaced by Entity Framework. For any new development looking for a standard Data Access technology, Entity Framework should be your primary solution. The Model-Based option feels a lot like DataSets in the designer (you can design your model by dragging tables and relationships to the surface), but Entity Framework can also work directly against your code (EF-CodeFirst) which many people find better, since you have total control over what your code will look like (plus it won't get overwritten each time you save the datamodel).

Unless you are open to 3rd party libraries, in which case there are a couple of great open source alternatives that include NHibernate and a few others.