i have a webpage running where it goes to an SQL Server and displays the data that's returned from it.

however, the users can select to see some data or a lot of data. in the ' a lot of data ' version they are going to get 10,000 records. currently i send these to a textarea on the screen. the whole thing loads up and they can browse about in it all they want. the problem is, that the time it takes to load that all up takes about 3 minutes. they know this and wait it out, but i was thinking this is getting a bit silly as the database is increasing in size every week.


so...


what should i do? i heard gridview is good? or can i somehow do the sql call and have it fill up the textarea as it gets the data from the server? not sure how to do that - but thats what i would like to do. so instead of textarea - should i use some other display object. also the sql call takes about 1/2 of the total time to download all that data, so ideally i would like to download just the first page, then show it. then start buffering the other pages.


well... thanks in advance for ideas. i am sure some of you guys have run into this before!

Is it necessary that all records be displayed in a single page ? Can't you have a fixed no. of records per page and have links for subsequent pages. If that is acceptable, use Pagination Queries. (Google for details). This will also decrease the retrieval time as the database will only fetch the required no. of records, not all

oh yeah... i brought that up with the client... they really like that they can see all of the data and go around in it up and down...