Your users may want to get their data in a specific order -- and not get it all at once. You can control both with the ObjectDataSource (and a little code). Databinding to tables in single-tier ...
dv.Sort = e.SortExpression & " " & shortSortDir GridView1.DataSource = dv GridView1.PageIndex = index GridView1.DataBind () GridView1.BottomPagerRow.Visible = True strLastSortCol = e.SortExpression ...