Summary

We've covered quite a lot of ground in this chapter, and although we haven't really done a lot of database-type things, it's been important to get some of this groundwork covered. Essentially, in this chapter we have studied connections between applications and data stores, and we've learned that:

• We use a connection to pass data between an application (such as an ASP page) and a data store, in the same way that two telephones communicate via a connection
• The data store can talk to an OLE-DB data provider, which in turn communicates with a data consumer
• In our case, the data consumer will be a set of interfaces called the ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). We use these objects in our ASP code
• The main ADO objects are called Connection, Command, Recordset, Record and Stream
• The ADO Connection object is an object that we use to represent the physical connection between the ASP page and the data store

Along the way, we met the old standard of ODBC – which was a standard for achieving access to databases. And we looked at what OLE-DB can do for us, and noted that we can think of ADO as just a high-level wrapper for OLE-DB.

Remember that ASP and ADO are quite separate technologies – they perform quite different tasks and can exist independently of one another. For the purpose of creating dynamic web pages, however, ASP and ADO provide very complimentary functionality.

Having laid a firm foundation on the subject of connections, it's time to put them to good use by manipulating some data. In the next , we'll meet the ADO Recordset object and see how we can use it to organize the information that we retrieve from the data store, and the information that we send to the data store.