What advantages do Spry datasets have over database datasets

Question

I have been studying the Spry Dataset and have found it terribly difficult to understand what use it is.
Can anyone explain why I should use it rather than using a database?
On the face of it, Databases are much easier to construct and access, so why use an alternative system.
From what I understand, I have to create a basic database table on an HTML page before I can attampt to create a spry dataset.
Or even use the dataset of a database to create a Spry dataset. I appreciate that there are other methods.
There are lots of articles telling one how to use it, but none stating what it is for and why one should use it - at least, none that I can find.
Where are the advantages of this system, or are you all using it just for technologies sake?
Or is it just an Adobe thing?

Answer 1

whatalotofrubbish wrote:
I have been studying the Spry Dataset and have found it terribly difficult to understand what use it is.
Can anyone explain why I should use it rather than using a database?
On the face of it, Databases are much easier to construct and access, so why use an alternative system.
From what I understand, I have to create a basic database table on an HTML page before I can attampt to create a spry dataset.
Or even use the dataset of a database to create a Spry dataset. I appreciate that there are other methods.
There are lots of articles telling one how to use it, but none stating what it is for and why one should use it - at least, none that I can find.
Where are the advantages of this system, or are you all using it just for technologies sake?
Or is it just an Adobe thing?
Hello,
There are big difference between Datasets and databases. While I disagree with your point that Databases are easier to construct instead of Datasets. I understand your point. You should not see Datasets and databases as rivals of each others but more of a extension of each other. You use a database to store all your data and contents. When you execute a query on your database your will get a result set, or dataset. This usually the place when Spry could come in. You have data output from your database, now you just place it static on your page. Nothing wrong with that. But if you wish to create a interactive page it will usually require you to build allot of round trips to your server to present your data in different ways.
With Spry these round trips can be handled on the client side. Once your users have received your data for the Spry Data Set there are allot things they can do with it, and usually faster than doing round trips to the server. For example your can sort and filter data sets, display information in a master and detail layout or even create different page states using the same data with out having to reload the page. This will create a more seamless experience for the user.
For example our company is currently developing a search result page based on Spry Datasets. On the server side we have our database clusters that out the data for a search query. But this is usually 200+ result rows. In a traditional static website it would take a while for the user to digg through all results. Either by navigating to a next page, or filtering the dataset using forms.
With Spry we now have our result set outputted as JSON (one of the formats Spry supports as data source for the Spry Data Set) we download it all to the client. And that is all they need. All sorting, filtering and pagination is done client side. So no more round trips to the server ( less server stress, and its faster ).
I could go on about for hours but I hope this will give a general point of usages. If not take a look at the Spry demos. Which use Spry Data to create rich and interactive pages, and just imagine how you would have done that using traditional techniques and how long it would take you to build that.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/demos/