What I tell people today is that with a brand new project, look at ADO first. If ADO does the job then by golly you ought to be using it because that way when ADO 2.0 comes up you will only be moving forward, you won't have to re-engineer. If it can't then RDO or DAO makes the most sense. I'm not encouraging people to go to the ODBC API any more. We're finding a number of customers that have taken that route in the past and when they moved to 32-bit there were so many changes in the way that the C interfaces worked, it made their lives very difficult.
ADO's the first choice.
Version 1.5 and 1.4 of ADO have got quite a bit more functionality than earlier versions. We're seeing a number of new OLE DB service providers come on line, both third-party and ones that we put in ourselves. OLE DB is Microsoft's strategy so we're putting more coal in that particular furnace than we are into ODBC drivers, which are basically static at this point. The real focus on our data access strategy is ADO because it covers this entire gamut of architecture and it's designed to be extensible to special things that, say, Oracle and only Oracle does. There's special things that only SQL Server does, special things that only you know about in your own OLE DB service provider, that you can define.