Retrieving, organizing, presenting, and modifying data are the main operations of most applications. Assuming that the other factors affecting the performance of your application are in reasonable balance (such as good logical design, optimum physical deployment, and adequate hardware resources), the single biggest improvement you can make to your application's performance is in the area of database access.
The following sections provide information to acquaint you with certain design and programming practices for optimizing database retrieval.
| Section | Description |
| Choosing a Data Access Technology for Performance | Recommends OLE DB with ADO as the best data access technologies, and provides a reference to a broader discussion of how to choose a data access technology. |
| Designing the Data | Briefly describes the process of data modeling, and provides a reference to a detailed discussion of how to design enterprise data. |
| Using Connection Pooling | Describes the benefits of connection pooling using Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). |
| Blocking Locks and Deadlocks | Describes how to use database locks to control data integrity. |
| Optimizing Queries | Explains how stored procedures and query tuning increase database access speed. |
| Some Practical Database Access Tips | Presents some useful tips to optimize your enterprise application's database access. |