A recordset is considered connected because, depending on it's cursor type and other options, it remains connected to the source database as you use it. It has been a while but some options of a recordset allow it to retrieve records that are newly added to a table. For example, you create your recordset and read the first 10 records, during the read another user adds a record which just so happens to correspond to the 11 record on the recordset, the next read of the recordset on it's next read will return the newly added row. A dataset on the other hand would read all 10 records into memory, if another user writes a new row the dataset will never access this row because it isn't connected to the database.

• Record is a fully connected approach where as dataset is a disconnected approach.
• Dataset can contain multiple tables where as if a recorset has to contain data from multiple tables it has to use a JOIN query.