Universal Data Access

So databases store information in a form that is accessible in a uniform way via ODBC. But what happens when you want to access data that's stored in one of the following formats:

The point is that, aside from all the databases in the world, there's a wealth of other data out there that's stored in other formats. There's a generic property of all the receptacles shown above, including databases – they're all used to store data. It might be a spreadsheet containing your company finances, or a text file containing a report on the conference you visited last month, or an email system and its accompanying mail messages – but it's all data. We use the generic term data store to refer to a receptacle that contains data.

There's another common factor linking all these data stores: we might want to access the data contained within and use it in our web pages and other applications! In this book, we're particularly interested in how we can access data stores from our ASP pages, and use their data to influence the appearance and content of our dynamic web pages.

These next few chapters will cover the techniques required to do just that. In our introduction to data access from ASP pages, we will use a database as the data store – but the techniques can be used to get at many different types of data store. Therefore, we'll be using the term 'data store' from now on whenever we refer to a generic type of data source.

So the question is one of how to access the data contained within these data stores. There's a problem with using ODBC here: generally, the information contained within each of the other media doesn't fit neatly into a database-type format – and more often than not, ODBC can't help you get at that kind of data.

In other words, the notion of database access isn't enough to fulfil the dream of universal data access – we need a way of getting at the other forms of data too. So, how can we get at the contents of your data stores quickly and easily?

Microsoft's UDA strategy has yielded a technology that has the potential to access the data contained in any kind of data store. This technology is known as OLE-DB.