provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.comEnvironment: Demo written in Visual C++ 6.0
We are all familiar with the CDatabase classes, and the CDaoDatabase classes. They are relitivly simple to use, they mesh well with our applicaiton and they are easily distributed. Using something like the GenericRecordset class (found here ar code guru) makes it even easier to create powerful database aplication with little effort on your part.
Now just as you felt safe to start doing database development in C++, Microsoft pushes something called UDA (Universal Data Access) and a relitivly simple but mostly undocumented object called ADO (ActiveX Data Object). Unfortunatly they felt that there is little need to show any kind of documentation for us Visual C developers. If you try to search around you will be hard pressed to find any good examples. Even here at code guru there is only 1 other article about ADO.
So after several months of playing around with ADO, I finally feel good about it, and will probably never use anything but ADO for all huturd development. When you see how easy it is to use ADO, and how powerfull it is (can we say thread safe?) you will probably never go back either. When I wrote the GenericRecordset for DAO, it was to provide a simple way to use dynamic data binding. That is, to allow me to base a recordset on a query rather than a table. One of the things I liked about ADO from the start was that this, dynamic data binding, is the default way ADO works...
Read article at Internet.com site