The very first step in accessing database information is to establish a connection with the database source. ADO provides the Connection object to manage connections between a Web page and a database.

To establish a connection, first create an instance of the Connection object.

Now everybody can connect to a database. Simple database access is a huge feature of ASP and one of the most widely used by developers but when you are first learning, it's hard to separate the database stuff from the rest of the code so I made this example.

The output of this example is written below. The html is poor at best...

16 records found!

The following are a collection of OLE DB Connection Strings encapsulated as complete ASP files. These are a quick and easy way of getting data out of a range of database types.

The connection strings are highlighted in blue and the parts of the script you should change to suit your database location, name, table and field are in bold.

This tutorial shows you how to set up a LOCAL Data Source Name, or DSN. This means that if you set up a connection on your own home machine then you will be able to connect to the database though if you move your code and database onto a live internet websever you normally will need the dsn set up by your hosting company's server.

If you cannot get in touch with your hosting company you may want to connect to your database with a DSN-less connection.

The question is how can an ASP file connect to a particular Microsoft Access database and retrieve the necessary records or edit or delete those records. Well the answer to our problem is Microsoft's ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) technology. ADO offers us two objects namely the Connection and the Recordset object that will allow us to do this.

To make a connection to our database we must first create an instance (create our own copy of the object) of the connection object and create a variable that will hold the object.

For our examples on this site we have chosen to use OLEBD rather than ODBC connection strings as they are faster and more stable.

Below are 4 connection strings that you could use 2 OLEBD and 2 ODBC. One example for each provides the physical path of the database and the other uses the Server.MapPath function. We also use the ADO connection in our examples below to open the connection object and make an active connection.

 The results described in this document are independent findings. They reflect my opinions only and have no bearing on any other party. The data presented here and its interpretation does not relate in any way to Microsoft(TM) or to any other software developed by Microsoft.

All trademark names appearing in this document are used for editorial purposes only and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringing on that trademark.

This step-by-step procedure demonstrates how to hand code an ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) data connection in an Active Server Pages (ASP) page.

For the purposes of this article, the sample to follow uses the Northwind sample database and establishes an ADO connection to both Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or 2000.

 Databases are a invaluable tool for storing large amounts of data in a structured and organized way. If you had an online store you could use a database to hold all your products details, such as price and availability. Your webpage would need to access the information in the database to display the product and all its details.

Another example of information a database could store would be all the usernames and passwords for a particular website. Once someone tried to log in their username and password would be checked against the database, if the username and password were valid (i.e. already existed in the database) then they would be granted access to the protected pages of the site i.e. a members area.