We have seen two needs of modern business rapidly emerge that require a new and more sophisticated approach to gathering data. The first need is that of accessing legacy data - that is, information that is stored around the business enterprise in disparate forms in various types of computers. Companies like IBM and Oracle suggest that the solution is to move everything into a single database structure. Well, if the world stood still, this would still be problematical at best. The second need is that of accessing non-relational data. With the advent of businesses' use of the Internet and corporate Intranets, there is a need to get information from e-mail, HTML pages, and even video! Clearly DAO is not up to this job.
So while other companies talk about trying to marshal all of the information stored in disparate formats in to a single standardized database structure, Microsoft has approached this problem from the other end of the spectrum. Their strategy is to access the data exactly where it is. Using what is known as Universal Data Access (UDA), there is no need to change or modify anything on the data side. Using a single data access model, the programmer can use the same code to access essentially any data, anywhere, at any time. If this sounds too good to be true, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy VB 6.0 has made accessing data using the UDA strategy. Let's take a closer look.