Chapter 7. COM

Having the right don't make it right.

—Kenneth E. Routen

Given COM's ubiquity both inside and outside of SQL Server, no section on application fundamentals would be complete without some discussion of it. I don't have the time or space to give COM the treatment I'd like to in this book, so I suggest you consult books such as Dale Rogerson's Inside COM (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1997) and Don Box's Essential COM (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998) to get the details of how COM works and how applications can make use of it. In this chapter, I will update the coverage of COM from my previous books and cover COM from a high-level standpoint. We'll also talk about how SQL Server exposes some of its functionality via COM and how it makes use of external COM components. See Chapter 15 on ODSOLE for more information on accessing COM objects from Transact-SQL.