Objectives

After reading this chapter you should understand:

• How to set up the environment needed to develop or run ODBC, CLI, and OLE DB applications.

• The basic program flow for developing these types of applications.

• Initialization and termination phases within these applications.

• How to handle diagnostic and error processing.

• The different methods of transaction processing, including preparing and executing SQL statements and the results from the database.

• Some advanced programming features.

• How to recognize and know when to use the different cursor types that are available to CLI.

• The catalog functions available for accessing database system information such as listing available tables.

• How to bind array of parameters.

• How to insert arrays of data into the database.

• The main objects available for OLE DB programming.