I recently read this very interesting article comparing the performance of a DataReader and DataSet.   I have long suspected that in an  asp.net application where you will not be doing a great deal of sorting or filtering and you cannot really take advantage of some of the built in features of the DataSet that it would be a heavier (slower) object than necessary.  

Craig Davis does a nice job of quantifying these suspicions.   He steps you through the tests that he performed and explains his conclusions that the DataReader is 27 - 56 times faster than a DataSet.

 http://www.devx.com/vb2themax/Article/19887/1954?pf=true

Has anyone else done similiar timings?    Do you get different results?

He also compares SqlClient vs.  OleDb.   Here he finds a 10 fold performance increase.    I wonder if anyone has done similiar timings on Oracle.   I would be very interested in seeing a comparison of OracleClient vs.   ODP vs. OleDB.