What are some of the advantage/disadvantages of using SQLDataReader?

Question

SqlDataReader is a faster way to process the stored procedure. What are some of the advantage/disadvantages of using SQLDataReader?

Answer 1

It depends on what you need to do. If you get back a page of results from the database (say 20 records), it would be better to use a data adapter to fill a DataSet, and bind that to something in the UI.

But if you need to process many records, 1 at a time, use SqlDataReader.

Answer 2

I assume you mean "instead of loading the results into a DataTable"?

Advantages: you're in control of how the data is loaded. You can ask for specific data types, and you don't end up loading the whole set of data into memory all at the same time unless you want to. Basically, if you want the data but don't need a data table (e.g. you're going to populate your own kind of collection) you don't get the overhead of the intermediate step.

Disadvantages: you're in control of how the data is loaded, which means it's easier to make a mistake and there's more work to do.

What's your use case here? Do you have a good reason to believe that the overhead of using a normal (or strongly typed) data table is significantly hurting performance? I'd only use SqlDataReader directly if I had a good reason to do so.

Answer 3

Advantages: Faster, less memory.

Disadvantages: Must remain connected, must remember to close the reader.

Answer 4

The key advantage is obviously speed - that's the main reason you'd choose a SQLDataReader.

One potential disadvantage not already mentioned is that the SQLDataReader is forward only, so you can only go through the records once in sequence - that's one of the things that allows it to be so fast. In many cases that's fine but if you need to iterate over the records more than once or add/edit/delete data you'll need to use one of the alternatives.

It also remains connected until you've worked through all the records and close the reader (of course, you can opt to close it earlier, but then you can't access any of the remaining records). If you're going to perform any lengthy processing on the records as you iterate over them, you may find that you impact other connections to the database.

Answer 5

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