Does SqlDataReader have an equivalent to Get*(int index) with a string key?

I'm trying to use a SqlDataReader (I'm quite aware of the beauty of Linq, etc, but the application I'm building is partly a Sql Generator, so Linq doesn't fit my needs). Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the best practices are when using SqlDataReader. I use code like the following in several places in my code:

using (SqlDataReader reader = ...)
{
    int ID = reader.GetInt32(0);
    int tableID = reader.GetInt32(1);
    string fieldName = reader[2] as string;
    ...//More, similar code
}

But it feels very unstable. If the database changes (which is actually extremely unlikely in this case) the code breaks. Is there an equivalent to SqlDataReader's GetInt32, GetString, GetDecimal, that takes a column name instead of an index? What's considered best practice in this case? What's fastest? These parts of my code are the most time intensive portions of my code (I've profiled it a few times) and so speed is important.

[EDIT]

I'm aware of using the indexer with a string, I misworded the above. I'm running into slow runtime. My code works fine, but I am looking for any way I can steal back a few seconds inside thes开发者_开发百科e loops. Would accessing by string slow me down? I know that the db-access is the primary time intensive operation, there's nothing I can do about that, so I want to cut back the processing time for each element accessed.

[EDIT]

I've decided to just run with GetOrdinal unless someone has more concrete examples. I'll run efficiency test later. I'll try to remember to post them when I actually run the tests.

---

The indexer property takes a string key, so you can do the following.

reader["text_column"] as string;
Convert.ToInt32(reader["numeric_column"]);

Additional suggestion

If you're concerned about the string lookup being slow, and assuming numeric lookup is quicker, you could try using GetOrdinal to find the column indices before looping through a large result set.

int textColumnIndex = reader.GetOrdinal("text_column");
int numericColumnIndex = reader.GetOrdinal("numeric_column");
while (reader.Read())
{
    string text = reader[textColumnIndex] as string;
    int number = Convert.ToInt32(reader[numericColumnIndex]);
}