Access Database Design & Programming, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17. ADO and OLE DB

What Is ADO?

In this chapter, we will discuss Microsoft’s latest database programming object model, called ActiveX Data Objects, or ADO. This object model is a successor to DAO and is intended to replace DAO. Of course, the arrival of ADO raises the question of whether to redo existing DAO applications in ADO, as well as whether to write new applications in ADO.

As to the former, I can’t see any immediate need to do so unless the application would benefit by some new feature of ADO. One possibility is that ADO may provide superior performance, but this is an ad hoc issue that will require experimentation in each situation. As to the latter, this decision is somewhat of a moving target. While DAO is more established and has proven to be reliable and stable, ADO is Microsoft’s current wave of the future. For instance, the new VB6 DataBinding object model is just a frontend for an OLE DB data client and is designed to use ADO. In order to keep up with Microsoft’s latest technologies—clearly a desirable goal—we will need to get on the ADO bandwagon. We can only hope that Microsoft will offer us other good reasons to join this bandwagon.

Actually, ADO is the immediate successor to Remote Data Objects (RDO), which is, in turn, the immediate successor to DAO. Since RDO did not get much first-string playing time, we will not discuss it in this book. My plan is to discuss the terminology related to ADO and its underlying technology, called OLE DB. Then we will look ...