Microsoft '''ADO''' (ActiveX Data Objects) is ana [[COMComponent object model]] object for accessing data sources. It provides a layer between programming languages and databases, which allows a developer to write programs which access data, without knowing how the database is implemented. No knowledge of [[SQL]] is required to access a database when using ADO, although one can use ADO to execute arbitrary SQL commands. The disadvantage of this is that this introduces a dependency upon the database.
It is positioned as a successor to Microsoft's earlier object layers for accessing data sources, including [[RDO]] (Remote Data Objects) and [[DAO]] (Data Access Objects).
