Those who provide the classes that you use to access the data in the database. There having four major types of objects as follows.
Object | Description |
Connection Object | Establish the connection to database |
Data Provider | Provide read only, forward only objects to access the data in an object |
Data Adapter | Provides the link between command & connection objects and data set objects |
When you are working with the specific DBMS, you have to choose correct data providers to implement your required operations. When you are working with SQL server database, you have to choose SQL data provider and you can use OLEDB provider as a generic data provider for any database that supports the industry standard OLEDB (Object Linking and Embedding Data Base) interfaces. As well you can use ODBC provider for any database which supports and work with any ODBC support database.
As well the following table shows what are the available data providers and their namespaces.
Provider | Namespace | Description |
SQL Server | System.data.SQLclient | Lets you to access SQLServer databases |
OLEDB | System.data.OLEDB | Lets you to access any OLEDB support Database |
ODBC | System.data.ODBC | Lets you to access any ODBC support Database |
ORACLE | System.data.ORACLEclient | Lets you to access ORACLE databases |
When you are developing database applications using ADO.Net you will want to add and imports particular namespaces that contains proper data provider classes. At the beginning each source file you have to use those required classes by using following code statements.
Imports System.Data.[namespace/provider name]
In our case we are using SQL servers as the back end. Therefore the statements as follows:
Imports System.Data.SQLclient