Chapter 5. DataReaders

In the previous chapter, you learned to execute simple nonquery commands to update the data source and retrieve calculated values. You can also use queries to fetch a set of rows from a data source in a single operation. In ADO.NET, there are two ways to use query commands: with the disconnected DataSet object, as discussed in later chapters, and with the DataReader, which is the focus of this chapter.

The DataReader is little more than a thin wrapper over a cursor that retrieves query results in a read-only, forward-only stream of information. The DataReader won't let you perform updates, see the results of live updates, or move back and forth through a result set as a server-side cursor does in traditional ADO programming. However, what you sacrifice in flexibility, you gain in performance. Because this cursor consumes few server resources and requires relatively little locking, the DataReader is always a performance-optimal way to retrieve data.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to use a DataReader to retrieve data and schema information, how to handle specialized data types such as binary large objects (BLOBs), and how to write code that can access any type of data source with the DataReader.