# Great article on Eggheadcafe.com on ultra-compact binary serialization of DataSets

<datetime class="hidden">2004-02-29T00:00</datetime>
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Was having a look at [this article](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20031219.asp) by Peter A. Bromberg Ph.D. (don't know if that's his given name ;-)) over at [Eggheadcafe.com](http://www.eggheadcafe.com), I always found it a bit annoying that [DataSets](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemDataDataSetClassTopic.asp) serialized to XML only. Using the incredibly cool [CompactFormatter](http://www.freewebs.com/compactFormatter/About.html), combined with the old favourite [SharpZipLib](http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/Default.aspx), he's able to squish a [DataSet](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemDataDataSetClassTopic.asp) down to just 4.6% of it's original size - now that's a pretty useful reduction!
Why is it useful - well when you're sending a [DataSet](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemDataDataSetClassTopic.asp) over a webservice, it's likely that most of your latency will be caused by the physical transmission of data...the less data, the smaller the latency!
I really like [Eggheadcafe.com](http://www.eggheadcafe.com), they tend to have[more](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030317.asp) [esoteric](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030405.asp) [articles](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030601.asp) than most other sites around...and it has the [best](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20011226.asp) [coverage](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20011229.asp) of [uses of compression](http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20011231.asp) in ASP.NET anywhere!