Table-Valued Parameter Rowset Creation

Although consumers can provide any rowset object for table-valued parameters, typical rowset objects are implemented against back-end data stores, and therefore provide limited performance. For this reason, the SQL Server Native Client OLE DB Provider enables consumers to create a specialized rowset object on top of in-memory data. This special, in-memory rowset object is a new COM object called a table-valued parameter rowset . It provides functionality similar to parameter sets.

Table-valued parameter rowset objects are created explicitly by the consumer for input parameters through multiple session-level interfaces. There is one instance of a table-valued parameter rowset object per table-valued parameter. The consumer can create the table-valued parameter rowset objects either by providing metadata information that is already known (static scenario), or by discovering it through provider interfaces (dynamic scenario). The following sections describe these two scenarios.

Static Scenario

When the type information is known, the consumer uses ITableDefinitionWithConstraints::CreateTableWithConstraints to instantiate a table-valued parameter rowset object that corresponds to a table-valued parameter.

The guid field (pTableID parameter) contains the special GUID (CLSID_ROWSET_TVP). The pwszName member contains the name of the table-valued parameter type that the consumer wants to instantiate. The eKind field will be set to DBKIND_GUID_NAME. This name is required when the statement is ad hoc SQL; the name is optional if it is a procedure call.

For aggregation, the consumer passes the pUnkOuter parameter with the controlling IUnknown.

The table-valued parameter rowset object properties are read only, so the consumer is not expected to set any properties in rgPropertySets.

For the rgPropertySets member of each DBCOLUMNDESC structure, the consumer can specify additional properties for each column. These properties belong to the DBPROPSET_SQLSERVERCOLUMN property set. They enable you to specify computed and default settings for each column. They also support existing column properties, such as nullability and identity.

To retrieve corresponding information from a table-valued parameter rowset object, the consumer uses IRowsetInfo::GetProperties.

To retrieve information about the null, unique, computed, and update status of each column, the consumer use IColumnsRowset::GetColumnsRowset or IColumnsInfo::GetColumnInfo. These methods provide detailed information about each table-valued parameter rowset column.

The consumer specifies the type of each column of the table-valued parameter. This is similar to how columns are specified when a table is created in SQL Server. The consumer obtains a table-valued parameter rowset object from the SQL Server Native Client OLE DB Provider through the ppRowset output parameter.

Dynamic Scenario

When the consumer does not have type information, it should use IOpenRowset::OpenRowset to instantiate table-valued parameter rowset objects. All the consumer has to provide to the provider is the type name.

In this scenario, the provider obtains type information about a table-valued parameter rowset object from the server on behalf of the consumer.

The pTableID and pUnkOuter parameters should be set as in the static scenario. The SQL Server Native Client OLE DB Provider then obtains the type information (column information and constraints) from the server, and return a table-valued parameter rowset object through the ppRowset parameter. This operation requires communication with the server, and therefore does not perform as well as the static scenario. The dynamic scenario works only with parameterized procedure calls.

See Also

Table-Valued Parameters (OLE DB)
Use Table-Valued Parameters (OLE DB)