Introduction to Server-Side Data

Data access is the heart of any real-world application, and ASP.NET provides a rich set of controls that are well-integrated with the managed data access APIs provided in the common language runtime. This section walks through several iterations of a sample that uses the ASP.NET DataGrid control to bind to the results of SQL queries and XML data files. This section assumes some familiarity with database fundamentals and the SQL query language.
Server-side data access is unique in that Web pages are basically stateless, which presents some difficult challenges when trying to perform transactions such as inserting or updating records from a set of data retrieved from a database. As you'll see in this section, the DataGrid control can help manage these challenges, allowing you to concentrate more on your application logic and less on the details of state management and event handling.

http://samples.gotdotnet.com/quickstart/aspplus/doc/webdataaccess.aspx