• Microsoft has introduced many data base access technologies like ODBC, OLEDB, RDO, DAO (Data Access Object), ADO (ActiveX Data Object)
• The overall goal is to provide a consistent set of programming interfaces that can be used by a variety of clients to talk to a variety of data sources, including both relational and non relational

• This is the first mechanism provided by Microsoft to work with databases
• This provides a C interface to relational databases
• Using this architecture, applications can talk to different relational databases using the same C interfaces
• This is widely adopted, and all major relational databases have provided ODBC drivers
• Some ODBC drivers have been written for non-relational data source, such as Excel spreadsheets

• There were two main drawbacks to this approach
• The first one is the restrictions to relational databases.
• Although drivers are written for RDBMS this approach puts a great burden on the driver to in effect emulate a relational database engine and this code would have to be replicated in each such drive
• The second drawback is the C interface, which requires a programmer in any other language to first interface to C before being able to call ODBC

• In this mechanism, the strategy is based on the Component Object Model (COM) which provides a language independent interface, based on a binary standard.
• Thus, any solution based on COM improve the flexibility from the standpoint of the client program.
• Microsoft’s set of COM database interface is referred to as “OLE DB”.
• The best feature is that OLE DB is not specific to relational databases
• Any data source that wishes to expose itself to client through OLE DB must implement an OLE DB provider.
• OLE DB itself provides much of the database functionality.
• The first OLE DB provider was for ODBC
• This gave OLE DB consumers access to all data sources supporting ODBC.
• The gain was a COM interface for clients.

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