As Shaggy says. With ADO.NET the connections you use are at a high level. There are also connection objects at a much lower level. When you create a connection, open it, use it and discard it, then open a second connection, you will likely be using the same underlying low-level connection. Creating the high-level object is very cheap, so doing so repeatedly is no problem. It's the low-level objects, which you never actually see, that are expensive to create, so they are created and discarded far less often.