What to study???

[Mikesc]

I've gotten pretty good at app programming and activeX stuff but I would like to beef up on my DB skills. I'm slightly more than confused about which area I should focus on, ie what's outdated, whats new, whats necessary for the workplace, etc... I would be most appreciative if someone could recommend a good approach. Between RDO, ADO, SQL SERVER, DAO, and the data control, I'm having a hard time figuring out whats in and whats out. The DAO object seems pretty straightforward, but is it somehow inferior, different from the others? Any good books anyone knows of??? Thanks in advance!!

[Jan Businger]

Hi,
recently, the following book was published:
"Programming Visual Basic 6.0" by Francesco Balena, Microsoft Press
ISBN 0-7356-0558-0
This is the best book (of many I have)on VB6 I've ever seen!!!
A.o. yr theme is discussed in Chapter 8 "Databases".

Good Luck

Jan

[Lothar Haensler]

my personal opinion:
use DAO for Jet databases (aka Access MDBs)
use ADO for all other data sources.
RDO is out (replaces by ADO, no future development and enhancement AFAIK).

Check out what MS has to say about UDA (universal data access) on their site.

[Crazy D @ Work]

DAO is old too, ADO is the way to go (at least that's what M$ wants us to use ... :-)

Crazy D :-)

[Lothar Haensler]

DAO may be old, but not really obsolete.
It's still the best interface for Jet, IMHO, because it offers the richest functionality.
You can still not do everything in ADO that you can do in DAO as far as jet databases are concerned.
In the long run DAO will be obsolete, too (I believe).

[Gary Grant]

For most database programming tasks I would suggest three things to learn:
ADO
DAO
SQL

DAO is Jet database engine specific (yes you can get at other database engines with DAO but you will have to go through the Jet engine. DAO is a good choice if you are using an Access database and will NEVER be required scale the application up.

ADO is great for scalability. The same code will work for an individual database and an enterprise database (if the application is designed carefully).

SQL (various flavors) is used by most database engines you are likely to implement for the scripting of
queries. You will need a basic understanding of SQL queries for either DAO or ADO (no it is not absolutely required but your ability to manipulate the database will be limited without SQL).

If given a choice ADO and SQL.