Introduction to Database Manipulation with ADO

The advent of the internet has transformed the world into a global market. With more and more people hooking on to the internet the expectations of speed and efficiency are far increasing. Gone are the days when surfers browsed through static HTML pages. The average surfer today demands personalized web pages i.e. customized and interactive web pages that change content depending on user request. This requires the storage of non pertinent information which includes information on users and information required by them in databases and its delivery in customized modes. Dynamic content can be offered to users in numerous ways such as CGI with Perl, ASP, Servlets, ColdFusion, JSP, Livewire etc.

Microsoft combined ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) with their proprietary scripting language VBScript to offer a simple yet powerful solution to the problem. ADO can be used to connect to any ODBC compliant database. This is a positive feature as most of the popular databases are ODBC compliant so all we need is a ODBC driver for the corresponding Database. ADO can also be used to connect and retrieve data from spreadsheet files like Excel and text or other plain format data files. ASP-ADO is a perfect solution for small and medium sized web sites owing to its cost effectiveness and minimum development cycle time.

ADO resides on top of the OLE DB which takes care of the medium through which the database is to be connected. This leaves the developer to just bother about how to use the ADO. Issues such as multiple connections, reusable connections and performance bottlenecks are automatically taken care of when ADO 2.0 is used in conjunction with IIS 4.0.

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