I'm completely new to Silverlight and I want to connect to a Netezza database with an ODBC connection and pull records to display nicely in Silverlight. What's the easiest way to do this? From some research, it seems creating a WCF RIA service is what most people do ( http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/354715/Creating-a-WCF-RIA-Services-Class-Library-for-a-Si ) but the process seems a bit convoluted. Coming from an ASP.net background, could I do something simpler like creating an ODBC connection in the code-behind (using System.Data.ODBC functionality), executing a query, storing the returned records in a Datatable and then binding that to some Silverlight control?