Starting using ADO - Give me your opinion

[Michel Jr]

Hi,

I have developed some programs using DAO. Now I intend to develop using ADO in a network with 15 computers. There will be 3 tables with about 80000 records and 30 tables with about 5000 records each one.

My questions are:
1- Is ADO very faster than DAO?
2- What's the best and safest database to use with VB6
using ADO? Is Access 97 good or not?
3- Should I use Windows 98 or Windows NT?
4- What should I change in my Windows configuration to work
properly with ADO?

Does anybody have 2 or 3 programs to send me as example? I need to know what has changed from DAO to ADO, how to manipulate databases, etc...

Thanks a lot for any help...

Michel Jr.

[Bigley]

1. Feck all in the difference speed wise
2. I use SQL - scalability being the main advantage
3. NT dear God always NT - 98 is a disaster zone
4. I wouldn't think you would need to change anything but I am open to correction on that

I have a couple of Word docs that explain the changes I will e-mail then to the address in your profile

[paulw]

Entirely depends.

If you currently have Access 97 and Windows 95, that will do if you want to calculate how many people will be coming to your party.

If you want to possibly calculate the tax baill for a multi-national corporation then move to NT and SQL Server - who's paying the budget and what are you tring to achieve? Answers are always dependent upon the environment you work in.

ADO should be quicker than DAO but it depends upon the quality of the providers that you use. With ODBC and OLE DB for tables of your size ADO will be marginally quicker, but real-world differences will be negligible.

Make sure you have the OLE DB provider installed to use ADO. Otherwise Windows shouldn't need changing. VB needs to have a reference to the ADO Library, of course.

Cheers,

P.

[Bigley]

I would imagine that if companies only adopted SQL and NT as their database and OS when they were multi-nationals with big tax bills then there wouldn't really be that many SQL and NT houses out there. The more important issue here would be security and the sensitivity of the data you are handling.

[iandarbyshire]

In my experience, if you are porting an existing Access 97 back end using DAO to ADO, it will actually run slower, although with the number of user you have it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Another thing to bear in mind if you upgrade to SQL Server is that you might have to amend some of your SQL, i.e "select *" needs to be "Select %". You may also lose some SQL functionality as Access SQL is actually more flexible than SQL Server. I ported an Access 97 DAO app to SQL ADO and found that all the data grids I was populating from Crosstab queries in Access didnt work and the recordsets had to be written into Arrays which were then used to populate the grids....

[Bigley]

Select % - what is that then? I've never used that in either Access or SQL

[iandarbyshire]

Originally posted by Bigley
Select % - what is that then? I've never used that in either Access or SQL

Its a wild card - I found that SQL Server wouldn't accept *, only %

[Bigley]

I have never used '%' to replace '*'. '*' always worked for me in 6.5 and 7.0 and I have only used '%' as a wildcard when comparing strings.