In this approach, the database vendor extends the database engine and programming interface to support new data types, including text, spatial, video, and audio. The vendor requires customers to move all data needed by the application, which can be distributed in diverse sources across a corporation, into the vendor s database system. This process can be expensive and wasteful. Universal Data Access is an effective alternate approach to the Universal Database Approach. The premise of Universal Data Access is to allow applications to efficiently access data where it resides without replication, transformation, or conversion.
Open interfaces allow connectivity among all data sources.
Independent services provide for distributed queries, caching, update, data marshaling, distributed transactions, and content indexing among sources. ADO or ActiveX Data Object is a new object model for data access. COM or Component Object Model defines the basic protocol for object communication in programming the object model. First, OLE DB has nothing to do with Object Linking and Embedding. Second, it isn't restricted to the databases.