 | |
ADO, OLEDB, and ODBC
What are these?
 | ADO is the Active Data Object COM based database access components
(from Microsoft). |
| OLEDB is the Object Linking and Embedding
Database. Big term to mean a database
driver that can talk to a database in a COM fashion. ADO uses OLEDB to
talk to OLEDB providers to obtain data. |
| ODBC is the Open Database
Connector; a database access API. Most databases have a
ODBC driver that can be used to access them. There is an OLEDB driver
that will allow ADO to access any ODBC compliant database. |
Why use ADO instead of the BDE?
There is no good reason to switch from the BDE to ADO if you are already using
the BDE or if the BDE is already your database of choice or if the BDE fits your needs.
The BDE is smaller to install then ADO and is by far the best integrated database
engine for Delphi components.
So what will ADO do for me?
If you are using Paradox or dBase files - not much. They won't outperform
the BDE until you get into other database types (Access) or bigger SQL based
server (SQL Server, Interbase, Oracle). ADO is completely free to distribute (yes, so is the
BDE). Many Windows platforms
already have the ODBC drivers installed for many of the common database sources, so it is
only necessary to install the ADO objects (smaller than the BDE). Using ADO and ODBC is a
bit faster than using the BDE to access ODBC data sources.
What do I need to install ADO?
It depends on what you currently have installed.
| If you have the Internet Information Server (IIS) or the Win95 Personal Web
Server (PWS) with the ASP extensions, then you
already have the ADO objects and at least some OLEDB driver. You may need to
update the ADO drivers; TaoADODataSet is currently ADO 2.0 compliant and the
Win95 PWS |
| If you installed the ODBC drivers (usually with Office or Access), but don't have the
ASP extensions, you can get just the ADO objects installation from Microsoft. |
| If you don't have either the ODBC driver or the ADO objects, you can get the free
package from Microsoft. Careful, it is no
small download. |
More information?
Of course, you can check out Microsoft.
But here are some additional resources that I have found to be very useful.
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Aloha Oi Software:
ADO