Question

I am looking for some suggestion over best practice (considering Memory and CPU time) to handle Nullable<T> fields returned from a stored procedure on using Linq2Sql.

Please consider the following scenario and limitations:

1. I want to avoid using fieldValue.HasValue check everywhere in the code. Thus, I need to replace all Nullable<T> with normal properties (esp DateTime, Double, Int) with some default value.
2. I am expecting to read ~1million objects with ~20 fields of Nullable type.
3. Memory and CPU usage is an important consideration.
4. The requirement is to get result from stored proc in an object (not DataRow), and thus using Linq2Sql.

Please share your opinion or experience over handling a similar situation.

Thanks for your interest.

Answer 1

Best Solution:

• Don’t allow SQL to return NULL Values.

• The easiest way to do this is to not allow the columns themselves to be null, but if that isn’t a possibility then you can do an ISNULL(field, defaultvalue) in the query that you are using to return the data.

Next Best Solution:

• Overwrite the LINQToSQL objects get call to check if the object HasValue and then if not set it to the default(type) value for the field.

There is no way to not check every value.