Whether we are building a plane in the living room, writing a book at two o'clock in the morning, or developing components, most of our time and energy is spent on thousands of details.
Dale Rogerson[1]
[1] Rogerson, Dale. Inside COM. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 2000. Page 128.
In this chapter we'll talk about automating (in other words, controlling) COM objects with Transact-SQL. Before we do this, though, let's review a bit about COM itself and discuss why we might want to control a COM object from Transact-SQL.