Came across a Microsoft Webcast and here is an interesting part on ADO.Net performance metrics :
- DataReader is 16% faster than the DataSet
- SqlDataReader is 115% faster than the OleDBDataReader
- Ordinal referencing of columns rather than by name is 11% faster Eg: dr[1] rather than dr["NAME"]
- Proper column casing increases the performance by 1% Eg:dr["NAME"] rather than dr["Name"] depending on the column name.
- Inline script is 233% faster than the DataGrid
- DataGrid with viewstate disabled is 66% faster than the DataGrid with Viewstate enabled.
- DataGrid without templates is 39% faster than the one with templates
- Explicit cast is 11% faster than the DataBind expression. Eg: ((DbDataRecord)Container.DataItem)["NAME"] is better than DataBinder.Eval
(Container.DataItem, “NAME") - Using DataCache is 637% faster than the standard DataGrid
Source : Microsoft Webcast