ADO

Short for ActiveX Data Objects, Microsoft's newest high-level interface for data objects. ADO is designed to eventually replace Data Access Objects (DAO) and Remote Data Objects (RDO). Unlike RDO and DAO, which are designed only for accessing relational databases, ADO is more general and can be used to access all sorts of different types of data, including web pages, spreadsheets, and other types of documents. Together with OLE DB and ODBC, ADO is one of the main components of Microsoft's Universal Data Access (UDA) specification, which is designed to provide a consistent way of accessing data regardless of how the data is structured.