Should I use Session/Cache to store the DataSet or

Question

The amount of coding that goes into the making of a DataSet is often significant. Now I'm not sure what the industry standard or best practise when dealing with data requests from multiple ASP.NET pages. Should I use a cache/session to pass on the DataSet from page to page or should I fetch directly from the database for each page?

What's the most common approach here?

Answer 1

Here are my thoughts:

It depends on the database and the type of data that you're trying to get, as well as what may modify the data. Do you have backend processes that run concurrent with the data you're going to want? Is this data only updated because of the current page, or does it update at all? How many people are going to use said page?

I personally almost always call to the database, simply because there are so many what-ifs when it comes to this kind of thing. At any time the data can change; it's never as static as people would think it would be. I would personally trade correct data over performance any day.

But that's just me personally. This question is so open ended that it's impossible to take every single thing into consideration since I don't know your database structure, nor how expensive it is to retrieve it, nor what you're using it for.

Sorry I couldn't really be more help.

Answer 2

It depends upon you need. If data size is very large then don't save it in Session or Cahce, because Session or Cache is stored in server Memory. Session is user specific and it will store data for each user in the server, so avoid from it. I think you should directly fetch data each time you need, don't save it in session. If data is very small/limited then you can save it in session ( example UserName or UserId etc ). If you are using a gridview to showdata then use paging and on each page request fetch the data from the database.