ASP.NET 2.0 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Accessing Data with ADO.NET

In This Chapter

✓	Relating to the basics of relational databases
✓	Using databases using SQL
✓	Manipulating your databases with SQL
✓	Issuing database commands with a .NET application
✓	Displaying data on a Web page
✓	Adding security to your SQL statements

If you’re creating software to run on the Web, chances are good that you’re also going to have to store data in a database. Thereby hangs a tale: Long before Microsoft’s .NET technology, Microsoft gave us the ADO (which originally stood for ActiveX Data Objects, although today the controls have little to do with ActiveX). The original ADO objects were controls you could use in programs built with Visual Basic 6.0 (or even C++); they provided easy access to your data.

Today, Microsoft has given us ADO.NET, the .NET version of data-access controls. Now, with the second version of .NET, we have ADO.NET 2.0.

ADO.NET 2.0 is a set of classes that you can use in your .NET programs. These classes allow you to access data stored in various places such as in SqlServer. But these classes do more than just access data. They are high-performance classes that Microsoft built with the Web in mind. If you have a high-volume Web server, you want to make sure that your data access is fast and efficient, and that the server won’t be brought to its knees trying to access too much data for too many users. Microsoft built the ADO.NET classes to conserve resources. When a Web session accesses the data using ADO.NET, the classes ...