Once you have established a connection to a remote data source, Microsoft Jet calls a series of ODBC API functions to determine the available objects (such as tables) on the remote data source. First, Microsoft Jet calls the SQLTables ODBC function to retrieve a list of all tables, views, synonyms, and similar objects. This is to ensure that the table you want to link exists.
Next, to get information on the requested table, Microsoft Jet calls ODBC informational functions such as SQLColumns (to determine the field names in the table) and SQLStatistics (to determine a table’s indexes). Finally, Microsoft Jet determines how to best represent the data types in the remote table with Microsoft Jet data types. This process is called data type mapping.
See Also For information about data type mapping, see “Mapping Data Types” later in this chapter.