Data Access and Transactions

Jet Database Engine and DAO

The Jet database engine is a workstation-based storage system. Jet databases can be accessed using Data Access Objects (DAO). You can also access Jet databases with the ODBC drivers provided with Access, but only limited functionality is exposed using these drivers. The Jet database engine has its own query and result-set processors and is capable of executing queries against homogeneous or heterogeneous data sources. Developers who are familiar with DAO can use ODBCDirect to bypass the Jet database engine when connecting to back-end data sources.

DAO requires that you change programming models depending on whether your data is stored in a Jet database or some other data store. ADO provides a common programming model for Jet databases or any other OLE DB data source.