While the potential for uses of persistent property sets is not fully tapped, there are currently two primary uses:
COM property sets were designed to store data that is suited to representation as a moderately sized collection of fine-grained values. Data sets that are too large for this to be feasible should be broken into separate streams, storages, and/or property sets. The COM property set data format was not meant to provide a substitute for a database of many tiny objects.
This section discusses two ways to use property sets. The first describes an example of storing property sets within files to allow common access to the information in the property set, and describes the "COM summary information" property set standard. The second is an example that shows how to transfer property sets between applications or COM objects as an effective means of communication.