All the surveys that I'm aware of among Visual Basic developers invariably conclude that the vast majority of Visual Basic programs are database and client/server applications. This isn't surprising because the language has a lot to offer developers. And this trend will surely grow now that Visual Basic 6 has introduced so many new tools for database and client/server (and, yes, Internet) programming.
In this chapter, I introduce you to database programming and show you how to use the ADO binding mechanism with bound controls and the ADO Data control, but the concepts underlying these technologies can be applied to other data consumers or sources.
Before showing what you can do with ADO in Visual Basic 6, however, I must quickly recapitulate database architectures and data access techniques.