ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. ActiveX Data Objects 2.6

One of the most popular reasons for constructing an ASP application is to enable people on an intranet or the Internet to manipulate data remotely. To allow for data manipulation throughout the enterprise, Microsoft introduced their Universal Data Access. The goal of Universal Data Access, as its name implies, is to allow tool- and language-independent access to data regardless of its location in the enterprise. From relational databases to email message stores, Microsoft hopes to allow developers access without special implementation-specific language or tools requirements.

Microsoft's Universal Data Access strategy is embodied in the Microsoft Data Access Components SDK. The current version (version 2.6 as of this writing) contains the following pieces:

ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) (covered in this chapter)

A set of components that allow programmatic access to data through an OLE DB provider.

OLE DB (not covered in this chapter)

A set of low-level programming interfaces that expose data using the Component Object Model (COM). Programming data access through OLE DB interfaces provides DBMS functionality appropriate to the data store.

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) (not covered in this chapter)

ODBC is a C programming language interface for access to data from a variety of DBMSes. The ODBC interface allows for maximum interoperability at the expense of DBMS-specific access methods that allow for more flexible or efficient programmability.

As previously ...