How should I manage large DataTables?

Question

For reasons that don't make a lot of sense (Read: Not my decision) I need to keep a large number of rows, about ~90,000, in a DataTable and I do not have the option of using a database.

I need to be able to search the DataTable efficiently to find rows that match some basic criteria. For example, I might be looking at a row that has the value 2 in two specific columns.

What is the best way to do this?

Edit: Please take a look at http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/62648#62648 for more details; after I work on this I will try and summarize the extra details from the chat here as well as provide my solution.

Answer 1

The solution I ended up using for this painfully awkward and inconvenient situation was to use DataTable.Select(), populate a new DataTable and then use the same operation to select the rows I needed from the refined DataTable.

I think that this solution is clumsy, but then again the constraints on the problem were somewhat unrealistic seeing as I was on a tight schedule as well.

Answer 2

You could easily use DataTable.Select()