I do a data conversion work and I frequently have to work with and view large data files. Millions of records and the tables can be a few gigabytes.

I need something like a VFP browse window so that I can get an overall feel for what's in the table. Paged views just don't give you the same feel for what you are working with.

Everything I've seen so far in .NET that would do this appears to want to want read all of the data into memory in order to display it in a grid. But because these files can be so large I would prefer to cache and fetch as needed.

I am currently writing my own workaround for this, but before I go too far I'm wondering if I missed anything and there is an easy way to do this that I did not see?