Introduction

This article aims at understanding the various concepts and classes available for data access in ADO.NET. This article is meant for absolute beginners and discusses various techniques of data access using ADO.NET.

Background

ADO.NET is a set of classes that comes with the Microsoft .NET framework to facilitate data access from managed languages. ADO.NET has been in existence for a long time and it provides a comprehensive and complete set of libraries for data access. The strength of ADO.NET is firstly that it lets applications access various types of data using the same methodology. If I know how to use ADO.NET to access a SQL Server database then the same methodology can be used to access any other type of database (like Oracle or MS Access) by just using a different set of classes. Secondly, ADO.NET provides two models for data access: a connected model where I can keep the connection with the database and perform data access, and another way is to get all the data in ADO.NET objects that let us perform data access on disconnected objects.