ADO Express provides components that offer the closest mapping to Microsoft's ActiveX Data Objects technology. Fortunately, the same components match the VCL component model and, thus, can easily be linked with data aware controls such as TDBGrid and TDBMemo. For applications where a close coupling between ADO-based data providers, and the application is an acceptable alternative, this can be ideal. And for applications that need to use every capability of ADO, the only other alternative is direct API calls to the underlying COM objects.