Visual Basic 6 Database Programming Bible

This book starts from the ground up, with a nicely digestible tour of the essentials of databases and SQL that's aimed at the beginner. Of course, it's de rigueur for VB titles to cover ActiveX Data Objects (ADOs), Microsoft's recommended set of objects for database programming. This book does a good job here, with three excellent chapters on how to be effective with ADO within your VB programs, both with "bound" controls and through custom code. Besides the fundamentals of ADO, this title also will serve as a handy reference, as each section lists all of the objects and methods that you'll need to use everyday. Other sections look at COM+ transactions and message-queue services, which provide much of the power for building robust, scalable database applications on the Microsoft Windows platform.

But this text goes much further than the "official" Microsoft way, with excellent coverage of administering and programming stored procedures on Oracle 8i (as well as MS SQL Server 7.0). With plenty of screen shots, this book does a great job of demystifying Oracle, and helps put this popular database into the reach of any VB developer. Several sections even look at XML done in VB, along with a basic tutorial of what XML is and how to combine it with ADO to deliver intermediate datasets. It's this cross-vendor perspective that distinguishes Visual Basic 6 Database Programming Bible from the rest of the pack. Clearly, today's VB programmers no longer can afford to have a narrow, Microsoft-only focus. This up-to-date text will help you gain a wider view of some of the more popular APIs and tools that you'll need to use to succeed with VB in real software for real organizations. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: History and overview of databases, relational databases, basic database-design principles: tables, views, and indexes; ODBC, RDO, and ADO database connectivity compared; SQL primer, introduction to Visual Basic 6 and tools, "codeless" database applications with bound controls, report design with the Microsoft Data Report Designer, ADO 2.5 (and ADOX) objects and methods, using SQL stored procedures and the Command object, writing and debugging stored procedures, the Connection, Recordset, and Field objects; basic COM+ principles, building custom VB COM objects, transaction basics with COM+, message queues and asynchronous messaging, XML tutorial (XML, XSL, and the XML Document Object Model), XML used with ADO and IIS applications, SQL Server 7.0 and Oracle 8i administration and database-programming tutorials (including stored procedures on both platforms), and a tutorial for the Microsoft Jet database engine.