I have 50 or 60 records of four or five fields. I need to load the records into RAM (From a CSV file), search on different fields, enumerate, etc. Not a lot of data, not a lot of functionality.

I was all excited to use the new (to me in D2010) TDictionary or TList, but thought that a TClientDataset (which I've never used before) might be more appropriate.

With a TClientDataSet, I can use .Locate on any field, enumerate with while NOT CDS.EOF, etc.

And, what exactly is this MidasLib that I have to use with CDS? Can I reasonably expect it to be supported in the future?

Is TClientDataSet still considered state-of-the-art, or is it showing its age and somewhat deprecated (literally and figuratively)?

I've seen colleagues use DX's TdxMemData. Why use it (or any of the other handful of memory datasets I've seen while googling this issue) rather than a CDS?

Related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/274958/delphi-using-tclientdataset-as-an-in-memory-dataset