ADO

ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) is a collection of COM objects for communicating between programming languages and OLE components for access to stores of data (databases or otherwise). A programmer can thus access data in a database without having to know how it was implemented.

Microsoft introduced ADO in October, 1996 to succeed RDO and DAO object layers for accessing sources of data. Objects in ADO are applied together with a programming language like Visual Basic or VBScript in ASP. The .NET Framework version of ADO is substantially distinct from pre-.NET ADO.