YEESH! FORGET DATAREADERS!
I see so much of this on forums and newsgroups, I almost feel compelled to say "something". It seems that somewhere along the way new .NET developers read (or are told) that the DataReader is the "most efficient way" to get data out of a database. What happens next is they take this 100% literally, and get themselves into all kinds of trouble - blowing up connection pools, trying to do things that you cannot do, and so on. This becomes the idee fixe de-facto method for getting data, no matter what. Yes! The DataReader IS the fastest way to get data out of a database. However, that comes with a price that you need to evaluate. DataReaders hold the connection open. You cannot have a method that just "returns a DataReader" - leaving you to blithely do whatever you want -- unless CommandBehavior.CloseConnection was used in the intial SQL call and you are prepared to call the Close method on your reader. In addition, DataReaders offer only ONE TIME firehose-st...