The best thing you can do is to Dispose of the connection object as soon as you are done with it. This can be handled in code a number of ways. Either explicitly call the Dispose method of the connection object, wrap the usage inside a USING block, or create your own data connection object that will do this for you. I created my own several years ago to make connections a lot easier on the code side and helps eliminate accidentally leaving a connection hanging open (which of course can trash your connection pool pretty quickly).