ASP.NET Cookbook

16.4. Speeding Up Data Access to a SQL Server Database Using the SQL Provider

Problem

You want to speed up data access in an application that will always be used with SQL Server.

Solution

Use the SQL Server managed provider instead of the OleDB managed provider for accessing the data in the database.

In the code-behind class for the page, open a connection to a SQL Server database using the SQLConnection class.

To test the SQL provider, we have implemented our example from Recipe 16.3 and replaced the getDataReaderTime and getDataAdapterTime methods in the code-behind with the code shown in Example 16-10 (VB) and Example 16-11 (C#). The output of the test is shown in Figure 16-3.

Figure 16-3. Performance using SQL managed provider output

Discussion

The common language runtime (CLR) provides four managed providers for accessing data in a database: SQL, OleDB, ODBC, and Oracle. The OleDB and ODBC providers can be used to access virtually any database—including SQL Server, Access, Oracle, and many others—using an OleDB (or ODBC) layer. OleDB communicates to a data source through both the OleDB service component, which provides connection pooling and transaction services, and the OleDB provider for the data source. In contrast, the SQL Server provider uses a proprietary protocol to directly access SQL Server, eliminating the additional layer of the OleDB service component and thereby improving ...