Chapter 11. ADO Express Components for CBuilder | C++Builder 5 Developers Guide

Chapter 11. ADO Express Components for C++Builder

by Mark Cashman

IN THIS CHAPTER

ADO Versus BDE
Component Overview
Database Connections
Accessing Datasets
Managing Transactions
Using Component Events
Creating Generic Database Applications
Performance Optimizations
Error Handling Issues
Multitier Applications and ADO

ADO stands for ActiveX Database Objects. ADO is Microsoft's replacement for the ODBC (the Open Database Connectivity) standard and earlier data access technologies, such as DAO and RDO.

ADO is a COM (Component Object Model) API (Application Programming Interface) that replaces the C language-based ODBC API and makes it easier to use object-oriented techniques with databases even in low-level programming.

The ADO components hide most of the complexity of dealing with the COM aspects of ADO behind an interface much like that of normal Borland VCL database components. In addition, they allow data from ADO to be used in normal VCL data-aware controls, such as grids, edit boxes, and charts . This is possible because the ADO components descend from TDataSet , and because TDataSource can work with any TDataSet descendant.

ADO can work with any database that has an ODBC driver. In addition, ADO offers support for data stored in nonrelational forms, such as XML (the successor to HTML) or email message stores, so long as there is a data provider that conforms to ADO standards. In theory, you can issue SQL against any ADO data, but there might be specialized forms of SQL needed to access nonrelational data.

ADO is a capable technology that offers complete access to almost every database in use. This chapter shows how the dbGo components provide you with the ability to access every feature of ADO, through an interface similar to the powerful framework Borland established for use with the BDE components.

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