Say Hello to ActiveX Data Objects - ADO
Both RDO (which is used, remember, for sending data over a network) and DAO (for desktop solutions) are relatively robust and mature technologies. So Microsoft decided to create a universal method of accessing Data that encompasses all of the functionality of both in a single interface.
With the Internet changing the way people handle data, not only do programmers need to access relational data sources, but also non-relational data such as hyper text markup language (HTML), mail, video, text, legacy system data, and just about anything else you can imagine. So over the next 18 months or so, Active Data Objects (ADO) will emerge as the single, unified alternative that will replace the current alphabet soup of data access choices. Programmers will write code that conforms to ADO and the rest of the data access will be handled under the hood. It sounds magical, doesn't it? Well, I think those people up in Redmond really are wizards.
The cool thing about ADO is that it not only provides us a consistent interface but also gives us high- performance access to just about any source of data. So whether you need to create a front end to a local database, or a middle tier that contains business objects, or even get data from an Internet browser, ADO is the single data interface you will need to use for your solution. Sounds almost too good to be true, don't you think? Well, stay tuned and let's see how it's done.