I strongly disagree. If you use a DataAdapter to populate a dataset, all it's doing is iterating over a reader internally and loading the results into the data

I strongly disagree. If you use a DataAdapter to populate a dataset, all it's doing is iterating over a reader internally and loading the results into the dataset. There's no reason it would ever be as fast, let alone faster, than using a reader yourself to populate a data structure that you actually want.