Your enterprise application probably needs to access data distributed throughout the organization, including mainframes, local workstations, and remote distributed files. Each of these data stores may be a different format, stored in a variety of database engines, and accessed in unique ways. The effective use of different data stores is a complex application programming problem, involving architectural design options, data access technology choices, and performance considerations.
While there are many excellent implementation strategies for high-performance data access, you should learn all you can about using OLE DB as a data provider and ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) as the data access technology. OLE DB with ADO provides a uniform data access solution for a wide variety of file structures and data stores. This combination always provides fast, scalable, easily maintained data access.
For More Information For more information on database access options (including OLE DB with ADO, RDO, DAO, and ODBC), and a discussion of how OLE DB and ADO work together to provide high-speed, universal data access, see Choosing the Right Data Access Technology in Chapter 5 of this book.