There is this nice paper written by Jason McGuire titled: Performance Comparison of Microsoft’s ADO and ADO.NET Database Connectors The quick answer to the question is: inside a .NET application, ADO.NET is 3 to 4 times faster then ADODB when accessing SQL Server. Well, not a big news you might say, going from .NET to COM and back is obviously a performance problem and also there was a bit of advancements since mid ‘90s, but it’s nice to find someone that published such analysis with such a great degree of details and precision. If you are...