Information on ADO

Microsoft is continually updating its ADO data interfaces and drivers. The latest download is at http://tinyurl.com/iza5. Other Visual Basic sites and technical publication sites maintain substantial information.

MDAC 2.8 RTM is available for download in English. The RTM release This redistributable installer for the MDAC 2.8 release installs the same Data Access components as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and is supported on Windows 2003, 2000, XP.

ADO Overview

Until the arrival of .NET interfaces, ADO (Active Data Objects) replaced ODBC (Open Data Base Connections) as the preferred technology for accessing data. Its main advantages are:

Universality

The same front end code can be used for accessing an NT SQL Server database as for a UNIX Oracle database or for Exchange Server structured storage or data in a video stream or for text files or for ... the list is continually growing.

Flexibility

ADO allows such things as remote (asynchronous) data sets: the ability to hold a subset of data locally, make changes, and then merge changes with a central database at a later time.

Ease of use

The syntax of ADO is very similar to DAO, the data access language used by Access since its inception.

ADO versus DAO and ODBC

DAO is faster in Access 97 and possibly also in Access 2000/XP/2003 when addressing native JET databases
Heavily tuned ODBC interfaces may still be more efficient as long as the underlying driver is refined
There are still no underlying ADODB drivers for some databases; in this case ADO will look for an ODBC driver, so there are more layers to traverse.

Code samples

Look on the side menu bar to go to some code examples of working with ADO to retrieve and update data.

Location Map

Updates

ADO