Sounds like you were using ADO recordset to loop through the table. I suspect you were using the Jet4 (MS Access) driver although that is not the only way to do it. You can use the oracle client driver with ADO.NET to do a similar thing. There are many examples online on how to user ADO.NET and oracle, visual studio has lots of tools to do it. Just beware that if the table or featureclass is versioned, not all the data will be in the base tables, some of it could be scattered in the adds and deletes tables, you would need a versioned view of the table to connect to rather than the table itself. You can also use arcobjects to do it, opening an sde workspace, getting the table, creating a search cursor, looping through the cursor, retrieving the data from the row. The ADO.NET way allows you to bind the datatable directly to the control without having the loop through the recordset or cursor which is kind of nice. I won't give you access to the geometry or do edits on a versioned table (it will let you but it is a bad idea)
Cheers