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>MS has also promised to do stuff with Linq to make .NET more attractive to this community. All I really care about is the automatic disk spanning for datasets, something that has been promised by YAG.
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There is something somehow similar right now.
SQL Server Compact Edition , with SQLCeResultSet, which is a scrollable, updatable cursor. Reads are directly from disk (so a binding to a 1 milion rows table is possible in milliseconds), also are possible indexed seeks, indexed filters, etc).
One can cache data using DataReader/SQLCeResultSet/SqlCeUpdatableRecord many, many times faster than DataSet. Then send local updates using replication or RDA.