Clarification of Best way to make a Select in a web page

Might want to look up entity framework. Basically it creates an entity model representation of your data tables, and it generates basic CRUD operation queries for you so you don't have to make too many custom queries. But like ryan said, it depends on many things on what is the "best" way.

Instead of using built-in paging feature in Gridview, write a custom pagination logic that will fetch only few rows of data from database according to current page number. SqlDataAdapter.Fill() method has an overload which takes startRecord and maxRecords parameters and allows you to select specific rows from SQL table. So if user clicks on page#2 of gridview, you pass (page_num - 1) * page_size as a startRecord of new result set.

This is unlike built-in paging feature in which you have to rebind whole grid everytime user select different page from pager.