ActiveX Data Objects

ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is an application program interface from Microsoft that lets a programmer writing Windows applications get access to a relational or non-relational database from both Microsoft and other database providers. For example, if you wanted to write a program that would provide users of your Web site with data from an IBM DB2 database or an Oracle database, you could include ADO program statements in an HTML file that you then identified as an Active Server Page. Then, when a user requested the page from the Web site, the page sent back would include appropriate data from a database, obtained using ADO code.

Like Microsoft's other system interfaces, ADO is an object-oriented programming interface. It is also part of an overall data access strategy from Microsoft called Universal Data Access. Microsoft says that rather than trying to build a universal database as IBM and Oracle have suggested, finding a way to provide universal access to various kinds of existing and future databases is a more practical solution. In order for this to work, Microsoft and other database companies provide a "bridge" program between the database and Microsoft's OLE DB, the low-level interface to databases.

OLE DB is the underlying system service that a programmer using ADO is actually using. A feature of ADO, Remote Data Service, supports "data-aware" ActiveX controls in Web pages and efficient client-side caches. As part of ActiveX, ADO is also part of Microsoft's overall Component Object Model (COM), its component-oriented framework for putting programs together.

ADO evolved from an earlier Microsoft data interface, Remote Data Objects (RDO). RDO works with Microsoft's ODBC to access relational databases, but not nonrelational databases such as IBM's ISAM and VSAM.