Macromedia dreamweaver 8-using dreamweaver User Manual

About database connections in ASP

623

OLE DB connections

You can use an OLE DB provider to communicate with your database. Creating a direct
database-specific OLE DB connection can improve the speed of your connection by
eliminating the ODBC layer between your web application and the database.

If you don’t specify an OLE DB provider for your database, ASP uses the default OLE DB
provider for ODBC drivers to communicate with an ODBC driver, which in turn
communicates with the database.

OLE DB is available only on Windows NT, 2000, or XP.

Different OLE DB providers exist for different databases. You can obtain OLE DB providers
for Microsoft Access and SQL Server by downloading and installing the Microsoft Data
Access Components (MDAC) 2.5 and 2.7 packages on the Windows computer running IIS.
You can download the MDAC packages for free from the Microsoft website at

http://

msdn.microsoft.com/data/mdac/downloads/

You can download OLE DB providers for Oracle databases from the Oracle website at

www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/windows/ole_db/index.html

(registration is

required).

In Dreamweaver, you create an OLE DB connection by including a

Provider

parameter in a

connection string (see

“Creating a DSN-less connection” on page 627

). For example, here are

parameters for common OLE DB providers for Access, SQL Server, and Oracle databases,
respectively:

Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;...
Provider=SQLOLEDB;...
Provider=OraOLEDB;...

For the parameter value of your OLE DB provider, see your provider vendor’s documentation,
or consult your system administrator.