O'Reilly Book Excerpts: Programming Visual Basic .NET ADO.NET,
Part 1 This excerpt is Chapter 8 from Programming Visual Basic
.NET, published in December 2001 by O'Reilly. A Brief History of
Universal Data Access Database management systems provide APIs
that allow application programmers to create and access
databases. The set of APIs that each manufacturer's system
supplies is unique to that manufacturer. Microsoft has long
recognized that it is inefficient and error prone for an
applications programmer to attempt to master and use all the
APIs for the various available database management systems.
What's more, if a new database management system is released, an
existing application can't make use of it without being
rewritten to understand the new APIs. What is needed is a common
database API. Microsoft's previous steps in this direction
included Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), OLE DB, and ADO (not
to be confused with ADO.NET). Microsoft has made improvements
with each new technology. With .NET, Microsof