Understanding Record and Stream Objects
William R. Vaughn · Apress eBooks · 2002
I did not discuss the newly introduced Record and Stream objects in any depth in the first edition of ADO Examples and Best Practices. At that time, these objects didn’t really fit well in a relational database model and, more importantly, they were very new and most of the existing OLE DB providers did not support them. I will not spend huge amounts of time on these objects in this edition either, but I do want to provide an overview reference for them. As you have already seen in Chapter 7, the Stream object can play a very useful role when handling files and BLOBs. I expect you’ll discover the same. This chapter focuses on a number of practical applications for the Record and Stream objects (mostly the latter) for database developers. The Stream object does not survive as such in ADO.NET, but there is a great deal of support in.NET for data streams. I discuss using streams in Chapter 16, “ADO.NET DataReader Strategies.”