Hi AutoFed, "I'm still not clear on your problem, but it sounds like maybe you are concerned that using DataAdapter.Fill is somehow inefficient for reading data. " : Yes. DataAdapter is meant for Query and Update data and not for Read Only purpose, i believe. Also, as u told below, its a real disconnected data fetches data at one shot and give it as DataTable. "But even if DataReader did return a DataTable as a result, there would be no difference between that and the DataAdapter.Fill. " : I agree. Pl. continue... "The only way to retrieve data from a data source is to execute SQL queries; " : Yes. "the DataReader stores one row at a time" : Im not aware or clear on this. Can u pl. explain this how ? Which will clear my doubt i feel. "the DataAdapter retrieves and stores the entire contents of the query result. " & "What other possibility is there? What is it that you want to happen that ASP.NET does not provide? If your only goal is to create a read-only DataTable, instead of the editable DataTable provided by the DataAdapter, that would be no more "efficient" than an editable DataTable: the data still has to be retrieved, stored, and accessed." : So, DataAdapter.Fill do the one what im expecting. Pl. tell me how DataReader retrives the data each row and gives us when we iterate it using the Read method. I thought it will fetch all the data from the DB and keeps it inmemory and gives us when we iterate using the Read method. Whereas, DataAdapter will fetch row by row and fills the datatable. Yours, Sankar.B