ADO+ helps you share your data in several ways.
A Database Management System (DBMS), such as Microsoft SQL Server 2000, mediates data sharing in several ways. First, it manages the concurrent access to data, ensuring that users who are manipulating the same data simultaneously do not interfere with each other. Furthermore, the DBMS conceals from programmers many of the details of the physical storage, allowing users and programmers to concentrate on what the data means, rather than how it is arranged on disk. Most DBMSs provide this storage-agnostic view of the data through the SQL language.
ADO+ can conceal from you some of the complexity of SQL, while delivering to you the features of DBMS technology.
OLE DB provides access to data across the organization. It defines a collection of COM interfaces that encapsulate various DBMS features and services. OLE DB providers exist for most commercial relational DBMS products, and for many non-relational stores.
Through the ADODataSetCommand object, ADO+ can work with any OLE DB provider, so you can use ADO+ to manipulate data in virtually any relational DBMS and data in many non-relational storage formats.
Distributed architectures promote data sharing in several ways. For example, they can support multiple clients operating simultaneously, thereby delivering database data to multiple users. Furthermore, distributed architectures minimizing the number of active connections to the database can greatly increase the number of served users by preventing the database from becoming an application bottleneck.
ADO+ provides an easy way to establish "disconnected" access to the database, thereby eliminating the database as an application bottleneck.
Industry standards such as XML – or for that matter, SQL and OLE DB – promote data sharing by letting programmers use the same methods and languages to access data in disparate products. That is, standards conceal from programmers the idiosyncrasies of particular products or product versions.
For example, as a standard language for manipulating database data, SQL lets programmers manipulate data in virtually any relational DBMS. OLE DB goes further, allowing programmers to manipulate data from a wide variety of storage formats, including non-relational formats such as that used by Microsoft Excel.
Similarly, XML allows programmers to exchange data with other programs in an agreed-upon but highly flexible format.
In solutions employing disconnected access to database data, ADO+ uses XML as a persistence and transmission format for disconnected in-memory representations of database data.