Data Access Objects, JET, and Access
Microsoft Access is the world’s most popular desktop relational database, used extensively for individual and small business systems. Although it can be used on a network, it isn’t a proper client/server system. If five users share a database across a network, there are five separate applications all opening and closing the same data file. Access doesn’t scale up to high volumes of users.
From the beginning, Access was split into a GUI (what you see when you start Access) and an engine called Jet. The Data Access Object (DAO) hierarchy was an object hierarchy for getting at the Jet engine; it contained objects to represent databases, tables, relationships between tables, fields, and queries. It was originally accessible only from Access and Visual Basic. The ability to rapidly build database applications was one of the key factors in Visual Basic 3’s huge popularity. With the arrival of Office 95, the DAO hierarchy became a full-fledged set of COM servers, allowing any COM-enabled language to open databases.
The popularity of this development model rapidly led to a demand to connect the same applications to client/server databases, and the DAO hierarchy was extended allowing it to use ODBC connections under the hood as well as Access databases. DAO now provides a comprehensive COM interface to a wide range of databases. It is available on all Windows systems with Office 95 or 97.
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