Where/When is the use of RBAR buffering related to ASYNC_NETWORK_IO waits negotiated between the Client/SQL Server, or Is it always utilized as in that is just how SQL Server pushes data to the client?
Is Row By Agonizing Row (RBAR) a feature of ODBC or .NET Data Components, also, does anyone know if it can be turned off or overridden?
This stems from a SP that was tuned to run in 5 minutes, but when put in a report it falls in and out of ASYNC_NETWORK_IO for another 5 minutes.
I think you're missing a reference. RBAR is a common acronym in the SQL Server community (I find it used quite commonly on the SQL Central forums) and it refers to a style of programming, not to a feature of any specific RDBMS or driver.
It refers to a (too common) style of programming, in which the data is retrieved one row at a time (probably using a cursor) and processed one by one, transforming, issuing additional selects, or stuff like that.
Usually who is using RBAR does it unknowingly, coming from a developer background, and not knowing "the SQL way" of doing things. Which is set-based, and usually approaches the problem at hand from perspective which is quite different from the one of a traditional (C, Java, C#) imperative language.
Source: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/sql/t-sql-programming/rbar-row-by-agonizing-row/