Working with Data

Learn SQL, data binding, ADO.NET Datasets, and how to connect to SQL Server and Microsoft Access databases. Also, learn to build your own SQL Query program that works with Access databases. Excerpt: This article introduces SQL, shows how to use ADO.NET Datasets, and connect to SQL Server and Microsoft Access databases. It introduces data binding and shows how to build your own SQL Query program that works with Access databases. Database access is the perfect example of source code reuse. The basic operations are always the same—add, retrieve, update, and delete records. The only thing different is the structure of the data. Yet, each database system has its own native programming library that is not compatible with other databases, making it difficult to port applications to other database systems. So, it is not surprising that numerous database libraries have been developed over the years to encapsulate the implementation details of database operations. In this article, we talk about how to access a database using ADO.NET—the set of classes that .NET provides for database access.