What You Can Do With ADO
ADO is designed to provide developers with a powerful, logical object model for programmatically accessing, editing, and updating a wide variety of data sources through OLE DB system interfaces. The most common usage of ADO is to query a table or tables in a relational database, retrieve and display the results in an application, and perhaps allow users to make and save changes to the data. Other things that can be done programmatically with ADO include:
Querying a database using SQL and displaying the results.
Accessing information in a file store over the Internet.
Manipulating messages and folders in an e-mail system.
Saving data from a database into an XML file.
Executing commands described with XML and retrieving an XML stream.
Saving data into a binary or XML stream.
Allowing a user to review and make changes to data in database tables.
Creating and reusing parameterized database commands.
Executing stored procedures.
Dynamically creating a flexible structure, called a Recordset, to hold, navigate, and manipulate data.
Performing transactional database operations.
Filtering and sorting local copies of database information based on run-time criteria.
Creating and manipulating hierarchical results from databases.
Binding database fields to data-aware components.
Creating remote, disconnected Recordsets.
ADO must expose a wide variety of options and settings in order to provide such flexibility. Therefore it's important to take a methodical approach to learning how to use ADO in an application, breaking down each of your goals into manageable pieces.
Four primary operations are involved in most ADO programs: getting data, examining data, editing data, and updating data. The next four chapters examine each of these operations in more detail.
Before proceeding, familiarize yourself with the objects in the ADO Object Model. Then review HelloData: A Simple ADO Application. This application is written in Visual Basic and performs each of the four primary ADO operations.
ADO
Version 2.7
Purpose
Microsoft® ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) enable your client applications to access and manipulate data from a database server through an OLE DB provider. Its primary benefits are ease of use, high speed, low memory overhead, and a small disk footprint. ADO supports key features for building client/server and Web-based applications.
RDS
ADO also features Remote Data Service (RDS), by which you can move data from a server to a client application or Web page, manipulate the data on the client, and return updates to the server in a single round trip.
ADO MD
Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (Multidimensional) (ADO MD) provides easy access to multidimensional data from languages such as Microsoft Visual Basic®, Microsoft Visual C++®, and Microsoft Visual J++®. ADO MD extends Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) to include objects specific to multidimensional data, such as the CubeDef and Cellset objects. With ADO MD you can browse multidimensional schema, query a cube, and retrieve the results.
Like ADO, ADO MD uses an underlying OLE DB provider to gain access to data. To work with ADO MD, the provider must be a multidimensional data provider (MDP) as defined by the OLE DB for OLAP specification. MDPs present data in multidimensional views as opposed to tabular data providers (TDPs) that present data in tabular views. Refer to the documentation for your OLAP OLE DB provider for more detailed information on the specific syntax and behaviors supported by your provider.
ADOX
Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects Extensions for Data Definition Language and Security (ADOX) is an extension to the ADO objects and programming model. ADOX includes objects for schema creation and modification, as well as security. Because it is an object-based approach to schema manipulation, you can write code that will work against various data sources regardless of differences in their native syntaxes.
ADOX is a companion library to the core ADO objects. It exposes additional objects for creating, modifying, and deleting schema objects, such as tables and procedures. It also includes security objects to maintain users and groups and to grant and revoke permissions on objects.
Main Components of ADO 2.7
Programmer's Guide
An introduction to using ADO, RDS, ADO MD, and ADOX.
Programmer's Reference
This section of the ADO documentation contains topics for each ADO, RDS, ADO MD, and ADOX object, collection, property, dynamic property, method, event, and enumeration.
Samples
Sample applications and code examples written in Visual Basic, Visual Basic Scripting Edition, Visual C++, and Visual J++.
Feedback
You can send feedback about ADO documentation or samples directly to the ADO documentation team.