Questions That Should Be Asked More Frequently

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Q. The ADO Cursor Engine sounds great! How do I make sure I'm using it?

A. Simply set the CursorLocation property on your Connection or Recordset object to adUseClient before opening your Recordset. For more information, see the discussion of the CursorLocation property of the Connection object (Chapter 3) or Recordset object (Chapter 4).

Q. If the Cursor Engine is so powerful and flexible, why isn't adUseClient the default value for the CursorLocation property?

A. Backward compatibility. The initial release of ADO used only server-side cursors. In order to ensure that code written for ADO 1.0 continues to run the same way with each successive version of ADO, the default is still to use server-side cursors. New components that use ADO, such as the ADO Data Control and the DataEnvironment, are not subject to those backward-compatibility issues, and they use the Cursor Engine by default.