Overview
The modern way to approach database access is through OLE DB. This chapter covers the OLE DB templates—the mechanism that Microsoft Visual C++ .NET provides for accessing data through OLE DB directly. OLE DB is designed to provide access to all types of data within a system, and it uses the Component Object Model (COM) to accomplish this. OLE DB is fairly flexible—it covers all the main SQL functionality, and it defines interfaces that are suitable for gaining access to non-SQL types of data.OLE DB data access has two major parts: consumers and providers. We'll take a look at the basic OLE DB architecture and then examine how the consumer templates work, and then we'll look at how the provider-side templates work.