Sylvain,

I would stay away from approach #2 because it really limits reusability of code or stored procs or whatever you do to fetch your data. It also makes testing much more complex because any change you make in your retrieval code potentially affects the other related items.

When we're talking on a fast connection I'd always vote for more atomic data access because that way you can isolate that stuff easily in your business object and logically group these calls. With a 'get me everything' approach you're almost always setting yourself up for an implementation specific (read used only once) method. This is not necessarily bad, but whenever you bulk multiple things together reusability is almost always nil.

There are special cases where this rule does not apply. In disconnected or low bandwidth environments it's often necessary to pull data all at once in one swoop. But even here you have to be careful because if you pull too many things and something along the way fails the whole boatload has to be thrown out.

Atomic access good! <g>...