Getting Connected

Abstract

when you want ado to retrieve data, you have to either create the data yourself or somehow connect to a data source and suck the data down. In some cases (as we’ll discuss in the “Desperately Seeking Performance” and “Passing Data Between Tiers” sections), you can extract data from nontraditional data sources, such as an ActiveX Server Page (ASP) or an XML data Stream. But if you want to get data out of SQL Server, Access (Jet), Oracle, or any other “traditional” database, you have to use a connection—at least at first. This also holds true for any of the plethora of ODBC and OLE DB data sources available when you install MDAC 2.x (see Figure 4-1). However, you don’t necessarily have to formally create your own ADO Connection object—in many cases ADO will create one for you.