Database Alphabet Soup

March 1997 / Reviews / Client/Server C++: Write Fast, Run Fast / Database Alphabet Soup

DAO? Jet? ODBC? RDOs? How do these terms all fit together? Do the technologies they represent compete with or complement each other? It's easy to get lost. Below is a simple road map to help you out.
DAO (data access objects) is an API that's based on OLE and is included in MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) version 4.0. DAO uses Jet, through which DAO components can access ODBC data sources, as well as indexed sequential-access-method (ISAM) databases (e.g., Paradox and Btrieve).
Jet is the database engine that Microsoft introduced with Access. The nati ve file format understood by Jet is the Access (MDB) file format, although Jet can access ODBC data sources.
ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is the "lowest common denominator" interface into a database. ODBC drivers exist for virtually every database back end known to humanity; there are even drivers for data in raw text or Excel spreadsheet files.
RDOs (remote data objects) appeared with Visual Basic 4.0 (which is now available in VC++) and provide a thin layer atop ODBC. RDOs' raison d'être was to expose database processing on the server side (processing that DAO so masked that most of its database processing takes place on the client side). RDOs are optimized to work with back-end query engines provided by, for example, Microsoft SQL Server.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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