Hi Sylvain,

>Thanks a lot Rick. I usually go for atomic access because of the reasons you mentionned and because I have a VFP background were passing the whole package in one shot was not a real option.
>
>After reading the MS documentations and some books were they mainly use ADO.NET all the way around, I kind of asked myself if this is really how it is used in real life or if it's just for the sake of simplifying the code (or it may be a marketing thing...) Your answer confirm that I should'nt beleive everything that is written (even more if it's from MS!)

Well, maybe you can't believe everything you hear either - from me or otherwise <g>...

I think the real answer is as always: It depends. Packaging everything up all at once can be beneficial in some scenarios, especially if you are going to use all of the data at some point anyway. However, in most cases this approach of pulling everything gets you into serious trouble with synchronization later on.

If possible doing things as atomically as possible is the best advice I could give anybody doing any sort of distributed and mutli-tier development. It isn't always the best performing solution, but it usually is the most maintainable and most flexible in terms of being able to detect failures and do something about them.