Chapter 6. INTRODUCING ACTIVEX DATA OBJECTS
IN THIS CHAPTER
ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is Microsoft's latest data-access method that's now the standard for most Office, Web, and Visual Basic environments. Products that ship ADO in the box include
Microsoft Office 2000
Visual Studio 6.0 (including all the languages in the box)
SQL Server 7.0
Data Access Objects (DAO), the previous standard, was used throughout Office and Visual Basic, but wasn't designed to be used with Web environments such as Visual InterDev and other data servers. Currently, there are no plans to update DAO beyond DAO 3.6, which includes support for Unicode and some bug fixes, but doesn't have any other new features included beyond 3.5.
Note
Although DAO won't be revised anymore, Jet, which is Access's native database engine, is alive and well. In fact, Microsoft has taken great pains to try to create parity between what developers had for managing databases with code in DAO and Jet, and that which is available in ADO and Jet. A number of new features can be found for Jet in ADO.
This said, you can do some tasks with DAO that aren't as straightforward in ADO. These will be noted throughout the chapter.