ADO, DAO?

I've heard ADO, and DAO listed in several places on VBworld, but I never see a real breakdown on them...

Could anyone tell me: The Advantages, The Disadvantages, The Differences.

Also, is it more feasible to store arrays of information in this manner then in just a comma delimited text file.

Hi.
Sorry to jump into the thread, but I'd like to hear this too.

THanks
:)

I'll give my $0.02 and then let the DB gurus do the rest.

DAO:
Specifically meant for work with Access and other local databases and thus cannot connect to server-side databases such as Oracle. Easy to learn and use. Very slow at times. Very well documented since it is so FRIGGIN OLD! Does not allow updates to SQL recordsets involving more than one table, thus making it somewhat inflexible.

ADO:
Can connect to any database. Much more powerful than DAO and faster but only if you know what you are doing. Much harder to learn. Often produces ridiculously incoherent error messages (see my post on ADODC error trapping in the Database forum). Allows multi-table updates.

As far as your question about storing data, whether you should use comma delimited files or databases depends on the situation. If you have a very simple structure and few records to access, the comma delimited files will be fine. If you get more complicated, then it will be easier to store the data in a database.

What are you trying to do with it. If need searches etc, better to use a database. Of course the data can be picked up by Excel easily from comma deliminated. Depends on what you are trying to do.

ADO/DAO

Think there are a few functions that DAO can do but ADO caren't, not sure about that but vaguely remember reading it. ADO is MS's new improved data access tool, replacing DAO and RDO, but then they are quite likely to move onto something else in due course.

If you have access to both, then it is probably more beneficial to you to go down the ADO path.

$0.02 worth

Just in response to drewdog's comment about speed of both ADO and DAO, I've read many times over that DAO is faster and more efficient than ADO, but ADO is more versatile.


Francis.

DAO is being phased out. All new development should be done using ADO