In response to the increased capacity of personal computer software tools, and their extended accessibility to external and remote data, businesses have a growing need to provide solutions that span desktop, midrange, mainframe, and Internet technologies. The expanding diversity in structure and complexity of business data creates the need for a universal data access middleware that enables a new class of solutions to be easily built and managed.
ADO can bridge the gap. As we've discussed in these two chapters, ADO is a higher level interface to OLE-DB. It provides the programmer with a very usable interface both for client server, Internet and intranet applications—allowing standardized access to almost any data provider. This doesn't just mean Active Server Pages programming. ADO can provide a translation layer for use with other tools and applications as well.
We haven't covered the real core of OLE-DB in these two chapters because, as an ASP programmer, you really don’t need to know what's happening 'over the fence'. However, we have included an Appendix in the reference section that describes OLE-DB in more depth, and discusses a middleware tool from ISG called Navigator. This can accomplish the real-world requirements of connecting your Active Server Pages code to a range of database systems and other data providers, including legacy systems. Check out Appendix J for more information.