There are many benefits to upgrading your data access layer to ADO.NET, most of which involve using the intrinsic DataSet object. The DataSet object is basically a disconnected, in-memory replica of a database. DataSets provide many benefits, but also present a few challenges. Specifically, you can run into problems related to data concurrency exceptions. I've created a simple Windows® Forms customer service application that illustrates the potential pitfalls of this particular problem. I'll walk you through my research and show you ways to overcome the data concurrency issues that arose. DataSets provide a number of benefits. For example, you gain the ability to enforce rules of integrity in memory rather than at the database level. The most important benefit of using DataSets, however, is improved performance. Since the DataSet is disconnected from the underlying database, your code will make fewer calls to the database, significantly boosting performance. As with most performance optimizations, this one comes with a price. Since the DataSet object is disconnected from the underlying database, there is always a chance that the data is out of date. Since a DataSet doesn't hold live data, but rather a snapshot of live data at the time the DataSet was filled, problems related to data concurrency can occur.