Chapter 7: Connecting Web Services to Databases

Overview

Across the Web, many sites allow client programs to connect to a database that resides on the server. Using capabilities offered by Active Data Objects (ADO) and, more recently, ADO.NET, programs can easily manipulate the data that resides within a remote database.

In this chapter, you will learn that using web services, database administrators can gain greater control over the database operations their sites expose to client programs. Rather than letting a client program connect directly with a database, the site can instead restrict a program’s database access to the operations implemented by a web service.

This chapter examines ways you can manage database operations using web services. To start, you will first examine database operations using ADO.NET. Next, you will learn ways you can offer (and better control) such operations to client programs using web services. By first building programs that perform ADO.NET database operations, you will learn that ADO.NET operations are quite straightforward. Then, you can easily use the ADO.NET operations to extend the capabilities of your web services.