>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.<

If you start getting a lot of data in those data sets, you can always squeeze them a little (or a lot) with something like this ( http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20031219.asp )