Chapter 6. Accessing Data: ADO.NET

6. Accessing Data: ADO.NET

Working with datasearching, updating, and processing itis one of the fundamental tasks of software. Today, much of that data is commonly stored in some kind of database management system (DBMS), usually a relational DBMS. Developers need some way for their applications to access this information. In the .NET Framework, this mechanism is provided by ADO.NET.

ADO.NET provides access to stored data

Like everything else in the .NET Framework class library, ADO.NET is nothing more than a group of types, all of which reside in the System.Data namespace. These types are used by applications that need to work with stored data, and they allow access to that data in various useful ways. The most common need is to work with relational data, such as tables stored in SQL Server or Oracle, and so much of ADO.NET focuses here. Yet data defined using XML gets more important every day, and so ADO.NET's creators also added support for working with XML documents. This chapter takes a look at what ADO.NET provides for applications built on the .NET Framework.

ADO.NET allows access to both relational and XML-defined data