Question

I have an SQL database, which is a “feeder” table. I put records in said table, a 3rd party package consumes (and deletes) them. All hunky dory – until the 3rd party package isn’t running. In thinking about how to detect that, I thought to myself… “well… what if I read all the keys in the table (its not very big – max a few dozen records), and kept them, and then in, say, 5 minutes, I checked if any were still in the table ?”

It may not be a brilliant solution, but it sent me off thinking about Linq and whether you could do such a thing (I haven’t used Linq before).

So, if I read all the record keys into a DataTable object and then, five minutes later, read all the records into another DataTable object, I can do a Linq select, joining the two DataTable objects on the key column, and then look at the results of “Count”, and if one or more, chances are the data in the table isn’t being consumed.

Or… is there a “cleverer” way than that ?

Answer 1

But this is more what I had in mind:

DataTable t1 = GetData(); // returns a datatable with an Int16 "Id" column
// time passes... your lamp is getting dim
DataTable t2 = GetData();

// some data changes have occurred
t2.Rows.Add(null, DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(10), "Some more");
t2.Rows[1].Delete();

EnumerableRowCollection<DataRow> rows1 = t1.AsEnumerable();
EnumerableRowCollection<DataRow> rows2 = t2.AsEnumerable();

// how many rows from r1 are still in r2
int n = (from r1 in rows1
        join r2 in rows2 on (Int16)r1["Id"] equals (Int16)r2["Id"]
        select r1).Count();

…which is the “linq/join” method I alluded to in the original question.