Description:
The new ActiveX Database Object (ADO) and Remote Database Services (RDS) standards from Microsoft are still relatively new terrain for Web developers. Professional ADO RDS Programming with ASP provides all you need to know to be successful with these new APIs. The book begins with a tour of earlier Microsoft database standards--open database connectivity (ODBC), Remote Data Objects (RDO), and Data Access Objects (DAO)--and then moves on to today's ADO and RDS. The authors provide blow-by-blow coverage of all the major ADO objects and methods along with many useful hints for successful programming. Standout material here is the coverage of ADO data shaping, which allows you to treat joined records as hierarchical record sets. The authors also cover RDS, which allows you to cache records locally in Internet Explorer 4/5 browsers, even while users are disconnected from the Internet. The book looks at the various options for using ADO/RDS, including strategies for balancing server-side and client-side processing. More advanced sections explore building (and deploying) custom RDS COM servers with Visual Basic. Although much of the material here is Microsoft-specific (and will work best with Internet Explorer and SQL Server), there is also a chapter on accessing Oracle databases. The book closes with 200 pages of reference material, including ADO 2, RDS 2, and object linking and embedding database (OLE-DB) topics. --Richard Dragan
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