Before you can access data from ADO or OLE DB, you must provide specific connection information (called initialization properties) such as the type of data that you want to access, the server on which the data resides, and the database in which the data is stored.
For example, to connect to a SQL server database you need to specify the OLE DB provider for SQL Server, a server name, and a database name.
A data link is a string version of this connection information that you can save and reuse in your applications. This string version can be referred to as a connection string. Initialization properties may vary between OLE DB providers.
Data links are saved either with your application data or in a separate file with a .mdl extension.
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