Here is short tutorial only about the difference DataSet, DataReader, DataAdapter and DataView in .net.

1. DataSet

Dataset is connection-less oriented, that means whenever we bind data from database it connects indirectly to the database and then disconnected. It has read/write access on data tables. It supports both forward and backward scanning of data.

DataSet is a container of one or more DataTable. More often than not, it will just contain one table, but if you do a query with multiple SELECT statements, the DataSet will contain a table for each.

You have to be careful about how much data you pull into a DataSet, because this is an in-memory representation. You can Fill a DataSet using the Fill() method of a DataAdapter.

You can download example code at the end of this tutorial!

2. DataReader

DataReader is connection-oriented, that means whenever we bind data from database it must require a connection and after that disconnected from the connection. It has read-only access, we can’t do any transaction on them. It supports forward-only scanning of data, in other words you can’t go backward.

DataReader fetches one row at a time so very less network cost as compare to DataSet(that fethces all the rows at a time). It is scalable to any number of records, at least in terms of memory pressure, since it only loads one record at a time. One typical way to get a DataReader is by using theExecuteReader() method of a DbCommand.

You can download example code at the end of this tutorial!

3. DataAdapter

DataAdapter is an ADO.NET Data Provider. DataAdapter can perform any SQL operations like Insert, Update, Delete, Select in the Data Source by using SqlCommand to transmit changes back to the database.

DataAdapter provides the communication between the Dataset/DataTable and the Datasource. We can use the DataAdapter in combination with the DataSet/DataTable objects. These two objects combine to enable both data access and data manipulation capabilities.

You can download example code at the end of this tutorial!

4. DataView

Generally, we use DataView to filter and sort DataTable rows. So we can say that DataView is like a virtual subset of a DataTable. This capability allows you to have two controls bound to the same DataTable, but showing different versions of the data.

For example, one control may be bound to a DataView showing all of the rows in the table, while a second may be configured to display only the rows that have been deleted from the DataTable. The DataTable also has a DefaultView property which returns the default DataView for the table.