>Actually, they do...check out these signatures on mmBusinessObject:

I'm sorry, I asked about those methods in mmDataAccessBase.
Those methods in DataAccessBase does not accept variable number of parameters.

>The ExecReader method provides an IDbConnection output parameter because you must leave the connection open until you are done reading through all of the rows in the DataReader. If you check out the MM .NET Dev Guide topic "Working with DataReaders" you will see that you also need to close the connection when you are done with the DataReader. You can either do this by closing the connection, or by closing the DataReader which in turn closes the associated connection. For example:

Closing datareader automatically closes the connection. When datareader is open, connection is also open, even when out parameter is not used.

I havent found any sample which shows that direct use of IDbConnection object is required.

Also:

I need to licence my application by a maximum number of simultaneous connections allowed.

I have found that only way for this is to open single connection at application start ( I belive my application needs only a single connection) and ask from server the number of currently active connections.
In this case I don't need to close connection.