ADO.NET :: ADO.NET and DataAccess Providers in .NET

ADO.NET

ADO.NET is the data access model that comes with the .NET Framework. ADO.NET provides the classes required to communicate with any database source (including Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft Access, Xml, and even text files).

DataAccess Providers in .NET

ADO.NET comes with few providers, including:

• OleDb
• SqlClient

There are other providers available, but we are not including them here as this tutorial is meant for beginners! When you want them, search for ADO.NET providers in Google or MSDN Microsoft made the SQL Server. So they gave a separate provider, specifically made for SQL Server. We can use the OleDb provider for all other database sources including MS Access, Oracle, Sybase etc. There is a separate provider available for Oracle.

A DATA PROVIDER is a set of classes that can be used to access, retrieve and manipulate data from the databases.

Both OleDb and SqlClient has its own set of classes, but they have the same concepts. We would like to classify the classes into two broad categories (this is not a microsoft classification, anyway!)

• Classes for communicate with database
• Classes for holding/manipulating data

The job of first category of classes is to communicate with database and send or retrieve data from the database. The second category of the classes will be used as a carrier of data.