Gaining a Perspective on Microsoft Data Access Components

Access 2002 continues Microsoft's strategy of emphasizing “Universal Data Access” for Windows database programming. Microsoft wants all Office users, not just Access developers, to abandon Data Access Objects (DAO), ODBCDirect, and the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) Application Programming Interface (API) in favor of a collection of Component Object Model (COM) interfaces called OLE DB and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). To encourage Access users and developers to adopt OLE DB and ADO, all traditional Microsoft database technologies (referred to by Microsoft as downlevel, a synonym for “obsolete”) are destined for maintenance mode. Maintenance mode is a technological purgatory in which Microsoft fixes only the worst bugs and upgrades occur infrequently, if ever. In 1999, OLE DB, ADO, and for Jet programmers, ActiveX Data Object Extensions (ADOX), became Microsoft's mainstream data access technologies.

Microsoft's primary goals for Universal Data Access are to