The practical focus is on explaining ADO and related standards. In a chapter-by-chapter tour, the book covers all of the bases with Microsoft Universal Data Access (UDA) strategy. You learn what works best when connecting to recordsets with ADO, and when to take advantage of Internet Explorer-specific APIs like RDS, data shaping, and JRO. Each chapter examines the objects in a particular database standard, and then drills down into the properties, methods, and events that you'll need to program with ADO effectively.

Tips and even warnings about known bugs for particular objects are provided in abundance. The charts listing features that are supported by various OLE DB providers also are useful. You get specific suggestions about which APIs to use, plus some benchmarking of various cursor types and database programming strategies (comparing stored procedures, parameterized queries, and hard-coded SQL within ADO code).

Reference material naturally makes up the heart of this text. With over 250 pages on all of the important ADO standards (including RDS, ADOX, ADOMD, and JRO), all of the properties, methods, events, constants, and even error codes are listed, making this an indispensable book for any VB, VBScript/JavaScript, or C/C++ programmer.

Experienced ADO developers will appreciate the attention to new features, including the latest in support for XML and multidimensional databases. Even if you're entirely new to Microsoft databases, this patient and very thorough tour of ADO can help you get productive with database development quickly on today's Windows. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Overview of Microsoft Universal Data Access (UDA)
• OLE DB and ActiveX Data Objects (ADOs)
• New ADO 2.6 features and enhancements
• ADO tutorial
• Asynchronous database programming with events
• Connection pooling
• Using the Connection object (including connection pooling, transactions, and events)
• The Command object in detail (including Command Streams, parameterized queries, and the Parameters collection)
• Using the Recordset object (methods, properties, events, and collections)
• The Record and Stream objects
• Guide to ADO collections (Errors, Fields, and Properties)
• Remote Data Services (RDS) APIs and tutorial
• Accessing database information with ADO extensions for DDL and security (ADOX)
• ADO Multidimensional (ADOMD)
• Jet and Replication objects (JRO)
• Tutorial for RDS data shaping
• Performance issues with ADO (cursor types compared)
• Enhancing performance with connection pooling
• Stored procedures and parameterized queries
• Comprehensive reference to all of the ADO objects, methods, properties, events, and error codes

This book is a reference guide for the ADO programmer; it's primarily aimed at demonstrating and explaining the features of ADO 2.1 and the ways that they can be used. As such, it isn't a beginner's guide - though if you have programmed any data-access applications in the past, you'll be able to use it to get up-to-speed with ADO.

In particular, the book is aimed at application developers who already use Microsoft's data access methods in their applications, but want to take full advantage of the new features of ADO 2.5 and 2.6. It includes all the information required for any reasonably experienced developer to start using ADO within their Web pages and distributed applications. Finally, it is ideal for existing ADO users, to bring them quickly up-to-date with version 2.6.