>It's not that. It's the bloat in the SOAP package and the data travelling over the wire. Encoding an XML string easily doubles its size (depending on the data density vs fields)... For Web Services that's a significant hit both in terms of perf (encoding/decoding) as well as the bandwidth requirements...

You're right, of course, (although I don't know much about the encoding/decoding thing) but I wonder how bad it really is. We have one DataSet that has 75 tables ... not every table always has data in it and none of the tables have more than a few rows each ... and yet, it doesn't really take that long to come across the wire. It's a totally acceptable time span (don't ask me what it is ... I haven't done the benchmarks, it's not my area of the application). Yeah, it would probably fly if we passed a DataSet instead of XML, but that's not my point.

Anyway ... I hope this has been an informative discussion for the lurkers. =)

~~Bonnie