In today’s high-technology world, it is inevitable that companies will find themselves needing to integrate data for a variety of reasons including system upgrades or conversions and internal/external data sharing.  While the integration process can be time consuming and frustrating, it doesn’t have to be a nightmare.  While working at BSO, I have learned new techniques that make the data integration process smoother.  Some of these processes are internal to our organization, such as developing code that allows various systems to interact with each other.  Others are external, such as taking preventative measures to insure that the data is “good” data.  For example, creating and implementing processes and procedures to track the entry of data and force accountability for errors.  This helps increase the degree of accuracy and consistency by minimizing human error.

Data integrity and integration are an important part of any business because a company’s data serves as the backbone of the company.  How it is used, how it is accessed, and how it is shared can greatly affect a company’s performance and success.  BSO uses its experience and resources to take the “nightmare” out of data integration, whether it’s a simple conversion or the development of management tools that can interact with each other.  Problems are scary, solutions don’t have to be.

During the first couple years of professional development, I created the databases as
usual, and then created the stored procedures that would handle the select/insert/update/delete operations.  And after creating those, I’d write the C# or VB .NET code that would call those stored procedures.  While not a necessarily difficult process, it did prove time consuming.

With the release of version 3.5 of the .NET Framework, Microsoft added a component that took most of the previously mentioned steps out of the picture.  And that component is called Language Integrated Query (LINQ, pronounced “link”).  LINQ is basically a set of standard query operators (in the native .NET programming languages) that can be used to interface directly with a number of different data sources.  It supports all standard query operators that you’d find in other query languages (like T-SQL) and other specialized operators.

For me, LINQ has greatly reduced development time.  I still have to manually design my databases, but I no longer have to create the stored procedures and code functions to handle the simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations.  All I have to do is add a .DBML file to my project, connect it to my database, and add the tables for which I need code classes generated.

And LINQ is not limited to just interfacing with database engines.  There are a number of different LINQ providers.  Here are a few examples:

1.LINQ to Objects – The LINQ to Objects provider is used for querying in-memory collections, using the local query execution engine of LINQ. The code generated by this provider refers to the implementation of the standard query operators as defined on the Sequence pattern and allows IEnumerable<T> collections to be queried locally. Current implementation of LINQ to Objects uses e.g. O(n) linear search for simple lookups, and is not optimised for complex queries.
2.LINQ to XML – The LINQ to XML provider converts an XML document to a collection of XElement objects, which are then queried against using the local execution engine that is provided as a part of the implementation of the standard query operator.
3.  LINQ to DataSets – LINQ also includes the LINQ to DataSets, which uses ADO.NET to handle the communication with the database. Once the data is in ADO.NET Datasets, LINQ to DataSets execute queries against these datasets.

There are several other benefits to using LINQ.

1.  It provides a common syntax  for all data, so once you get used to the syntax you can use it with any provider.

2.  It provides strongly typed code for your objects.  This way, your compiler can find errors earlier in the development lifecycle.

3.  LINQ makes it easier to transform data into objects by reducing the amount of work you must do to translate between object-oriented code and data paradigms.

Despite all the benefits, I have noticed some drawbacks of LINQ.  When you start getting into more large-scale querying, the difficulty of writing the LINQ query is much higher than writing a stored procedure.  Also, stored procedures (especially complex ones) still tend to have higher performance.

Sources

1.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINQ

Website design, development and rollout is one of the BSO’s primary functions as all programming at the BSO is based on internet application development methodologies. The BSO specializes in the process of capturing the client design and producing that concept into a working form that the client can maintain or be maintained by BSO staff.