>>>Try to download 3 tables independedly from any source (maybe three different sources) and then try to use SQL on the dowloaded datasets. Granted you could do some with LINQ, but it is no SQL standard. What is the reason to reinvent different DML methodologies again and again while we've got a SQL standard. I just don't get it. It is plain stupid and wrong. Why should it make a difference whether the data comes from a server or already is loaded in ADO.NET ??
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>>You probably know that a DataSet does not need to have the same structure as the underlying database. If you want to do a join between multiple tables, you can define the result set as a "table" in the DataSet.
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>WTF (which is the abbreviation for three days of the week, if you didn't know) is the difference between a table and a "table"? And there's a result set in the dataset, or a place where it can be defined? This is so knowing confusing.
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>IOW, you may be able to join records from three datasets only if you thought about it in advance and applied some precautionary properties to the dataset, so that it comes as a table or "table" (whatever), but if you don't it's a... what? A collection of objects with one property per field? Or a collection of records, where each record is a collection of field objects? How do you apply something to a column (as in "replace all field4 with [goodbye]"), or how do you relate the records?
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>I mean, it's been eight years and the poor guys should be given some relief. When I read the stuff in 2003 it seemed like you had to respect the 10:1 ratio in the number of lines. I'd expect that these record-oriented things should become easier by now.

The table in quotation marks referred to the Table collection within a DataSet object, to distinguish it from a table in the database. It's in memory, not on disk.

A DataSet is whatever you define it to be. The definition can be modified. It's exactly akin to a VFP cursor in that regard. The only difference is it describes something that resembles a database, not just a table.