ADO.NET

ADO.NET is a data access technology from the Microsoft .NET Framework that provides communication between relational and non-relational systems through a common set of components. ADO.NET is a set of computer software components that programmers can use to access data and data services from a database. It is a part of the base class library that is included with the Microsoft .NET Framework. It is commonly used by programmers to access and modify data stored in relational database systems, though it can also access data in non-relational data sources. ADO.NET is sometimes considered an evolution of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) technology, but was changed so extensively that it can be considered an entirely new product. ADO.NET is conceptually divided into consumers and data providers. The consumers are the applications that need access to the data, and the providers are the software components that implement the interface and thereby provide the data to the consumer. Functionality exists in Visual Studio IDE to create specialized subclasses of the DataSet classes for a particular database schema, allowing convenient access to each field in the schema through strongly typed properties. This helps catch more programming errors at compile-time and enhances the IDE's Intellisense feature. A provider is a software component that interacts with a data source. ADO.NET data providers are analogous to ODBC drivers, JDBC drivers, and OLE DB providers. ADO.NET providers can be created to access such simple data stores as a text file and spreadsheet, through to such complex databases as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, IBM Db2, Sybase ASE, and many others. They can also provide access to hierarchical data stores such as email systems. Because different data store technologies can have different capabilities, every ADO.NET provider cannot implement every possible interface available in the ADO.NET standard. Microsoft describes the availability of an interface as "provider-specific," as it may not be applicable depending on the data store technology involved.