serializing a datatable for later reuse

Question

Hi everyone,

I have a populated DataTable I'd like to serialize to a file for later use. I've been looking over the options involved with this and wondered if someone could point me in the right direction.

What I'll be creating are two methods-- one for writing the datatable to a file, and another for creating a new datatable using the file as input. Does it make sense to use the WriteXML() and Load() methods to do this, and if so, which flag(s) are ones to focus on? Thanks for the guidance.

I'm using .Net 2.0 if that helps.

Answer 1

You might use the basic technique of serializing your database into CSV files with headers. Some database management systems support easy loading of data from such files. And in case your dbms doesn't it wouldn't be too difficult to write some code that'd do this for you. Does that answer your question?

In my opinion the disadvantage of xml is that it contains possibly more meta-data than actual data. In case of csv files meta-data is not repeated.

Answer 2

I would go for the read/write xml methods. We use that pretty extensively. It's quick, it's easy, it's built into the framework.

Answer 3

Is the datatable an object in memory? If so, you could simply go with Serialize and Deserialize Methods. They are relatively quickly and you can persist the result anywhere you want.

Answer 4

I think Silveira comment mean use of binary serialization. And its right that it very fast compare to XML which serialization is very slow compare to binary specially for large amount of data. Also it take a lot less space on disk compare to XML.

    public static void Serialize(DataSet ds, Stream stream) {
        BinaryFormatter serializer = new BinaryFormatter();
        serializer.Serialize(stream, ds);
    }

    public static DataSet Deserialize(Stream stream) {
        BinaryFormatter serializer = new BinaryFormatter();
        return (DataSet)serializer.Deserialize(stream);
    }