1.1. A Short History of Universal Data Access

To get a clear picture of what Microsoft has in mind with ADO.NET, you need to look at their previous database APIs. In the past ten years, Microsoft has tried over and over again to solve the problem of universal data access. For developers the need has always been to balance simplicity with performance. Unfortunately, these needs are often at odds with each other.

In the beginning (1990), Microsoft knew that database access would be an issue for their developers and they had a plan. Microsoft knew that developers were creating applications that needed to talk to databases on other platforms, mostly UNIX minicomputers or mainframes. Their solution was to use the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) application program interface (API). This API let developers access data in these back-end systems.