Although the best method is to exclude long data from the select list, some applications do not formulate the select list before sending the query to the ADO.NET data providers (that is, some applications use syntax such as select * from <table name> ...). If the select list contains long data, then some data providers must retrieve that data at fetch time even if the application does not bind the long data in the result set. When possible, try to implement a method that does not retrieve all columns of the table.