Working with ADO.NET - Introduction

Introduction

The .NET framework ships with a namespace, System.Data, that is not part of the ECMA class library. Mono has implemented it however. This namespace is also often called with it's marketing term "ADO.NET". The name commes from ADO, the ActiveX Data Objects, Microsofts latest Database layer. ADO.NET builds on top of it, partially. The mono implementation does not.

ADO.NET is an API to access Data sources of any kind, but especially relational Databases.

Microsoft ships the .NET Framework with Database providers for MS SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC, Ole-DB and XML.
Mono does ship all of these, but additionally native providers for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and IBM DB2.

Those Databases not available directly can be accessed through either ODBC or OLE-DB. Both are implemented on Windows and Unix systems. All those databases share a common interface, that makes them easy to use, and speeds up porting. There is also a xml provider, that enables you to access xml files as a database.

This chapter will look at the databases available, differences in the providers, how to install & program with it and will give you some examples.

A. Credits

Authors: Johannes Roith (johannes@jroith.de)