Hi Paul.

>I've always read "connectionless" to mean that
>maintaining a connection isn't required.

That would make sense. I'd assume (before checking) that a DataReader (by contrast) must keep the connection open. Again, this makes sense as the DataReader only contains one record at any point in time, fetching the next record from the network buffer in response to calling the Read() method. Depending on the size of the result set, you could close the connection before the entire result set has been returned, which may not be the case with DataSets.