Brief introduction to the usages of Access data bases

Brief introduction to the usages of Access data bases

What I think is the most compelling thing about Visual Basic is it's easy way of accessing and modifying databases. This is what I think you should learn next; you will find many applications for this knowledge. I almost never make a program without using a database for data storage.

There are many ways to work with databases in Visual Basic, and I would think you have at least glanced at the Data control. I will not even mention the Data control further in this text, since it is so easy to use and too limited to be interesting for a professional developer. (Ok, there are some exceptions to this.)

What I will teach you to use in this text is DAO (Data Access Objects). You will get familiar with opening a database and retrieving/adding/deleting/updating records from tables. I will only use an Access Database (*.mdb) in my examples, since this is the most used DBMS (DataBase Management System) for smaller applications made in Visual Basic. We will at the end of this lesson have made a simple, yet functional, phone book application.

This text requires some knowledge of the Visual Basic programming language and you should be familiar with the Visual Basic IDE (Integrated Development Environment).