OLE DB Consumer Templates: A Programmer's Guide

By Pierre Nallet

OLE DB, a set of interfaces for data access is the fundamental building block for Microsoft's strategy for database connectivity. This book explains in-depth how to use OLE DB templates to help C++... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201657929
• ISBN13: 9780201657920
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Length: 426 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

This is a good Book handling some advanced OLE DB topics.

The coverage for basic OLE DB is not good in this book. To get a decent coverage of this in my opinion you can do no better than: "Beginning Components for ASP" which not only explains basic OLE DB well, but also explains MTS and Writing components for ATL to work with ASP amongst other things.

The one and the only....

This is perhaps the only book available that provides clear and fairly deep coverage of ATL Consumer Templates. Well written, compact sensible examples, right to the point. In addition to ATL Consumer Templates, the author presents a set of useful extensions and to his credit - he managed not to turn this book into a marketing brochure for his own extension library. After having read pretty much every book that current market has to offer on the subject of ATL Consumer Templates I got a lucky break with this one - it's just so much better than one page description of Consumer Templates in "Visual C++ Database Programming" by Wendy Sarrett and especially the terrible reprint of the on-line docs in "Learn OLE DB Development with VC++ 6.0" by Nathan Wallace. If I could only find a similar book on provider programming....

Great book, lots of typos

This is the best book on the market concerning the subject, but you should browse the online documentation first to orient yourself. The author clearly knows what he is talking about based on experience. The author's OLEDB extensions rectify many the shortcomings of ATL for OLEDB. If you are familiar with ATL, OLEDB is a much more powerful way to program data access than ADO. I find the object model is actually clearer and simpler to use than ADO's (this is not the case when you try coding OLEDB without ATL, unless you are a masochist).There are very few complete examples. In computer books, you have to find a balance between adding bulky printouts of code versus having insufficient working examples. The books errs on the latter side and is filled with tiny snippets of code that are sometimes hard to place in context. The book also suffers from lots of obvious typos. I am not sure why the editors didn't take more time since there is no real competitor to this book on the market.The book should have also included a bit on the relationship between OLEDB and ADO. For example, if you write an object that is called from a dispatch interface (ASP, say), you might want to perform most of the processing in OLEDB and then return the results as an ADO recordset rather than an OLEDB resultset. This translation isn't that hard to do, but it took me hours to find the correct functions / interfaces in the documentation.

Great book about OLE DB consumers

The book provides a detailed guide to developing OLE DB consumers using ATL. Unlike other books it goes much further than just showing you how to build a primitive consumer using ATL wizard. The author explains how to use OLE DB templates to develop real world applications, e.g. with various types of accessors, accessing not only regular tabular data sources but also OLAP and hierarchical data, etc.A very good on-line support for the book provides some useful template extensions as well other additional information.Unfortunately the book doesn't touch OLE DB providers but at least it's clearly stated in the title.Very recommended!

Sure Beats The Online Documentation

After spending months struggling with the very confusing Microsoft provided online documentation this book was a welcome sight. As I am sure you have noticed there are very few books dedicated to the OLE DB ATL wrapper classes. Typically OLE DB coverage is the exclusive domain of a single chapter in an introductory COM book. This book provides a very good introduction to the ATL OLE DB wrappers. It assumes a working knowledge of COM and does not provide a detailed analysis of the guts of OLE DB, the Microsoft documentation is still the best place for this. The author appears to have plenty of real world experience under is belt to back up his text. The author also provides an interesting set of extensions to the default ATL wrappers available for download through a web site. You may not need all of the extensions but they do provide a very good base for other possible enhancements to the library as well as a good place to test your knowledge of the concepts discussed in the book.Well worth the cash, especially if you have had OLE DB thrust upon you and are in a "learn and burn" situation.