MDAC 2.5 SDK - Technical Articles
A data provider owns its own data and exposes it in tabular form. It is not dependent on other providers—service or data—to provide data to the consumer. OLE DB ships with data providers for ODBC, Oracle, Microsoft Jet, and SQL Server™, plus the OLE DB Simple Provider Toolkit.
To integrate ODBC into the Universal Data Access strategy, Microsoft built an OLE DB Provider for ODBC. The ODBC provider ensures that anybody’s existing ODBC data works well in the world of Universal Data Access. In other words, it implements the OLE DB object types that share component data objects on top of any ODBC driver. It does so very efficiently; you can access the data through OLE DB with the same performance that you would get if you accessed it through ODBC.
Without losing your investment in ODBC, you can communicate with ODBC data stores directly through OLE DB interfaces, or through ADO because ADO consumes OLE DB interfaces.
The OLE DB Provider for Oracle enables high performance and functional access to Oracle data for Microsoft Visual Basic applications.
The provider exposes interfaces to consumers wanting access to data on one or more Oracle servers. You can use it to develop an optimized OLE DB consumer for Oracle databases.
The OLE DB Provider for Oracle is compliant with OLE DB version 2.0 and later.
The provider supports Component Services functionality. The Component Services enable OLE DB session object pooling and enlistment of automatic transactions. Integration enables this and satisfies pure performance requirements for ASP applications that work with Oracle and ADO.
The Microsoft Jet Provider can open Microsoft Jet 4.0 databases as well as databases created with previous versions of the Microsoft Jet database engine. It also provides access to many other desktop database sources, such as Excel, dBASE, Paradox, text, and Lotus 1-2-3, using Installable Indexed Sequential Access Method (IISAM) drivers.
SQLOLEDB, the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server, exposes interfaces to consumers wanting access to data on one or more computers running Microsoft SQL Server. SQLOLEDB is compliant with OLE DB version 2.0 or later. The provider passes the command statements (such as SQL-92 and Transact-SQL) through to the server.
The Microsoft OLE DB Simple Provider (OSP) Toolkit offers a framework that simplifies the task of writing OLE DB providers over simple data and exposing that data to any OLE DB consumer (such as ActiveX Data Objects or any OLE DB–compliant application or control). Using the OSP Toolkit, developers can quickly build OLE DB providers over simple data sources (for example, in-memory arrays) and can expose OLE DB interfaces without having to build an entire OLE DB provider from scratch. The OSP Toolkit is language neutral, supporting implementations in Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual C++, and Microsoft Visual J++.