Much Ado About ADO

Databases are the strong, silent type. Day in and day out, they house and keep our data in check, sitting silently in the background until we query them for information. Equally strong and silent is the technology that lets scripts interact with databases: ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). Using ADO, you can interact with not only a variety of databases, including Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle, but also other data stores such as Active Directory (AD) and Microsoft Excel. You can even use ADO to work with data in comma-separated value (CSV) text files.

Perhaps it's because ADO is the strong, silent type that not much has been written about it compared with how much coverage other technologies such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) have seen. If you conduct a search on the Scripting Pro VIP Web site you'll run across a lot of articles that discuss scripts in which ADO is used but few articles that explain how to use it. The most notable articles are "Rem: Obtaining Data from a SQL Server Database" by Mike Otey and "An ADSI Primer, Part 5: Using ADO to Script Fast ADSI Searches" by Alistair G. Lowe-Norris. "Rem: Obtaining Data from a SQL Server Database" discusses how to use ADO in VBScript code to access a SQL Server database, read the data from a table, and write that data to a file. "An ADSI Primer, Part 5: Using ADO to Script Fast ADSI Searches" is part of a series on ADSI, so it concentrates on how to use ADO for accessing AD. The article provides an introduction to the ADO objects, properties, and methods you use for that purpose. . . .