MDAC 2.5 SDK - Technical Articles
ADO can dynamically expose properties specific to a data provider via collections of provider properties. In addition, ADO provides type extensibility by allowing access to COM objects (for example, Rowset and Stream) exposed as column values. ADO does this without breaking existing applications because it does not alter its Automation interface to provide these dynamic properties. This makes it very easy for ADO to adapt and grow with future data providers.