OLEDB
OLEDB (which probably stands for Object Linking and Embedding Database, but as far as we can tell has never been written out in full before now) is intended as a successor to ODBC. ODBC allowed connection to relational databases; OLEDB extends this to allow querying of arbitrary data providers such as hierarchical filesystems, mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange, text files, and nonrelational mainframes. It contains functionality to let you determine the capabilities of a provider at runtime. Many database vendors have now written OLEDB providers, and it can work through ODBC for those that have not. OLEDB consists of a wide range of low-level COM interfaces, and OLEDB programming is usually done by people writing database drivers; Microsoft provides an easy-to-use layer above it, as we will see next.
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