MDAC 2.5 SDK - OLE DB Programmer's Reference
Chapter 2: Data Source and Session Objects

Data Source Objects

In OLE DB, a data source object is a COM object through which a consumer connects to a provider's underlying data store.

It is important to distinguish a provider's data source object, which provides data from the data store to a consumer, from the data store itself, which contains the data but interacts with the consumer only through the data source object. For example, a data store might be a comma-separated-value (CSV) text file, an SQL DBMS, or an in-memory array in an application.

The data source object cotype is defined as follows. For more information about cotypes, see "OLE DB Objects" in Chapter 1, "Overview of OLE DB."

CoType TDataSource {
   [mandatory]   interface IDBCreateSession;
   [mandatory]   interface IDBInitialize;
   [mandatory]   interface IDBProperties;
   [mandatory]   interface IPersist;
   [optional]    interface IConnectionPointContainer;
   [optional]    interface IDBAsynchStatus;
   [optional]    interface IDBDataSourceAdmin;
   [optional]    interface IDBInfo;
   [optional]    interface IPersistFile;
   [optional]    interface ISupportErrorInfo;
}

For information about the registry entries used by providers to register classes of data source objects, see "Provider Registry Entries" in Chapter 18, "Programming Considerations."