Introduction of ADO .NET

Introduction of ADO  .NET

ADO stands for ActiveX  Data Object .ADO.NET is an object-oriented set of libraries that allows  to interact with data sources.  The data source is a database, but it could also be a text file, an Excel spreadsheet, or an XML file.ADO .NET consists of classes that allow a .NET application to connect to the data source, executes commands and manage disconnected data. One of the key Differences between ADO.NET and other database technologies is how it deals with Challenge with different data sources, that means, the code you use to connect to an SQL Database will not differ that much to the one connecting to an Oracle Database.

ADO.NET is Microsoft's platform for data access in its new .NET Framework. It  is scalable, interoperable, and familiar enough to ADO developers to be immediately usable and  By design, the ADO.NET object model and many of the ADO.NET code constructs will look very familiar to ADO developers.

Benefits of ADO.NET ?

ADO.NET offers numerous advantages compared to its previous versions of ADO and other data access components.

1. Interoperability- The ability to communicate across  heterogeneous environment.

2. Maintainability- Various substantial, architectural changes and transformations required in the life of a deployed system can be easily carried out, if the application is implemented in ADO.NET using datasets.

3. Programmability- ADO.NET data components enables you program more quickly and with fewer mistakes in Visual Studio encapsulate data access functionality. It also allows you to access data through typed programming as ADO.NET data classes generated by the designer tools result in the typed datasets.

4. Performance- ADO.NET datasets offer performance advantages, for disconnected applications, over ADO disconnected record sets.

5. Scalability- ADO.NET enables scalability by helping the programmers to conserve limited resources.

6.Productivity-The ability to quickly develop  robust data access applications using ADO .NET's  rich and extensible component object model.

THE ADO.NET NAMESPACES

ADO .NET has several namespaces containing classes that represent database objects such as connections, commands, and datasets. Perhaps the most important of these

classes is the new XML-enabled DataSet which provides a relational data store and astandard API independent of any underlying database management system.

.NET Framework Namespaces Involved in Data Access:-

NAMESPACE	DESCRIPTION
System.Data	Provides base classes for ADO.NET, focused on the DataSet class and its child classes, such as DataRow, DataColumn, and DataRelation.
System.Data.SqlClient	The SQL Server .NET data provider.
System.Data.OleDb	The OLE DB .NET data provider.
System.Data.Common	Provides classes that are shared by all .NET data providers. Many of these classes are abstract and may be used to create custom data providers.
System.Data.SqlTypes	Provides classes for native data types in SQL Server.
System.Xml	Provides classes for processing XML.
System.Xml.Schema	Provides classes for processing XML Schema Definition (XSD) schema files.
System.Xml.Xsl	Provides classes for processing Extensible Stylesheet Transformation (XSLT) transforms.

There are two managed providers:-

1-The Oledb

2-Sql server

The OLE DB and SQL Server managed providers

DataSet provides a stand-alone entity separate from the underlying store, in most cases it will get its data from a managed provider whose role is to connect,

fill, and persist the DataSet to and from a data store. .NET offers two such providers embodied in the following two namespaces:

• System.Data.SqlClient—Used to talk directly to Microsoft SQL Server.

• System.Data.OleDb—Used to talk to any other provider that supports OLE DB (a COM-based API for accessing data).