Question

Following code takes like 2500 milliseconds on an i7-*3.4 GHz windows-7 64-bit computer to read an excel sheet with 25000 lines and 5 columns. Each cell approximately include a string with 10 characters. Is it normal? How can I read it faster?

 Stopwatch sw1 = Stopwatch.StartNew();
 var connectionString = string.Format("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source={0}; " +
                                             "Extended Properties=Excel 12.0;", filename);

 var adapter = new OleDbDataAdapter("SELECT * FROM [roots$]", connectionString);
 var ds = new DataSet();
 adapter.Fill(ds, "roots");
 sw1.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Time taken for excel roots: {0} ms", sw1.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);

Answer 1

I wish to present my findings as an answer because the behavior is always consistent.

I have copied your code and put inside a button click event, just changed a bit to be sure to dispose the adapter and the connection for every test made.

// test.xls contains 26664 rows by 5 columns. Average 10 char for column, file size is 2448kb
// OS Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. CPU Intel Core2 Quad Q9550 2.83ghz 
// 8gb ram and disk C is an 256gb SSD cruzer

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

        string filename = "c:\\tmp\\test.xls";
        Stopwatch sw1 = Stopwatch.StartNew(); 
        var connectionString = string.Format("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source={0}; " + 
                                              "Extended Properties=Excel 12.0", filename);

        using(var adapter = new OleDbDataAdapter("SELECT * FROM [roots$]", connectionString))
        {
            var ds = new DataSet();
            adapter.Fill(ds, "roots");
            sw1.Stop();
            Console.WriteLine("Time taken for excel roots: {0} ms", sw1.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);
        }
    }

So, this is basically is your code. This code executes in 500ms. BUT….
if I keep the file test.xls open in Excel 2010, the execute time jumps to 8000ms.

I have also tried this code variation, but the end results are the same

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string filename = "c:\\tmp\\test.xls";
        Stopwatch sw1 = Stopwatch.StartNew(); 
        var connectionString = string.Format("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source={0}; " + 
                                              "Extended Properties=Excel 12.0", filename);
        using(OleDbConnection cn = new OleDbConnection(connectionString))
        {
            cn.Open();
            using(var adapter = new OleDbDataAdapter("SELECT * FROM [roots$]", cn))
            {
                var ds = new DataSet();
                adapter.Fill(ds, "roots");
                sw1.Stop();
                Console.WriteLine("Time taken for excel roots: {0} ms", sw1.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds);
            }
        }
    }

and, no, it’s not the Open() of the OleDbConnection, is always the adapter.Fill()