>What if the user wanted a grind (ugh) on the form that shows them all customers from CA. Easily could be many, many records.

Very true, but then we're probably talking about a subset of the fields in the table, reducing the result set further.

Even still, the fact that a user may want 100K rows in grid doesn't change the fact that they will never be able to view or act on all of them. Far from it. Many solutions (that I will be the first to admit, don't seem ideal at first) involve giving the user the first hundred matches, and if they need more when they've digested the first result sets make subsequest requests to the data tier.

FWIW, I sympathize with your concerns, I think we've all had to get over this hump. But its virtually a requirement for C/S and nTier applications.