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SqlDataSources Unusable if Tables Allow NULL's

November 10, 2005
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I’ve been working on a problem for a client’s project. We are doing pretty raw RAD design for a small intranet project so I thought, hey let’s just do SqlDataSources to get the pages up and running fast. This works fine *if* we don’t want any concurrency.

Let me repeat that, this works fine *if* we do not want concurrency.

The problem lies in the fact that we have columns that are null-able (pretty common in schema design). The concurrency that is generated by ASP.NET 2.0’s SqlDataSource does not do the same concurrency (e.g. WHILE foo = @foo OR (foo is null and @foo is null)) that Typed DataSets and CommandBuilders have done for several years.

My guess is that this is another example of how fractured the data teams in Microsoft are. One team does DataSets, which another does Typed DataSets, and if I am correct, yet another does the DataSource work.

Arg!