Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference

The .NET data access subsystem is made of two main subtrees the managed providers and the database-agnostic container classes. ADO.NET managed providers are a new type of data source connectors and replace the COM-based OLE DB providers of ADO and ASP. As of this writing, the .NET Framework includes two native providers one for SQL Server and one for Oracle and support for all OLE DB providers and ODBC drivers. Third-party vendors also support MySQL, DB2, and Sybase, and they have alternate providers for Oracle.

A managed provider is faster and more appropriate than any other database technology for data-access tasks in .NET. Especially effective with SQL Server, a managed provider hooks up at the wire level and removes any sort of abstraction layer. In this way, a managed provider makes it possible for the ADO.NET to return to callers the same data types they would use to refresh the user interface. A managed provider supplies objects to connect to a data source, execute a command, start a transaction, and then grab or set some data.

In this chapter, we focused on establishing a connection to the data source and setting up commands and transactions. In the next chapter, we'll complete our look at ADO.NET by exploring data container classes such as DataSet and DataTable.