Data shaping, or hierarchical recordsets, allows you to represent a tree-like structure or related recordsets. This is achieved by having a field in a recordset contain a recordset of its own, allowing database relationships to be expressed, and multiple recordsets to be returned in a single call.

Optimization is always a concern for every developer. After all, it hardly matters how cool your code is or what great features it uses, if your users have time to make a cup of coffee before your code responds. Database access has always been an area where optimization is an issue. Compared to many tasks, data access is relatively slow.

Instead of typing in all of the parameter details yourself, you can get ADO to do it for you, simply by calling the Refresh method.

The use of stored procedures is the one area where the Command object comes into its own. A stored procedure (or stored query as it's sometimes called) is a predefined SQL query stored on the database.

The Command object is designed specifically to deal with commands of any sort, but especially those that require parameters. Like the Connection object, the Command object can run both commands that return recordsets as well as those that don't. In fact, if your command doesn't have parameters, then it really doesn't matter whether you use a Connection, a Command, or a Recordset.

The Connection object is what gives us a connection to the data store, but that's not all the Connection object does. As well as storing details of the connection (such as the type of data store and the features it supports), we can use the connection to run commands.

While being able to create a page dynamically is a nice feature, the real power of Active Server Pages comes from its ability to create web-based applications.

In this chapter, we have looked at how a physical object can be represented by a programmatic object. This programmatic object has all of the interfaces of the physical object, and it can be used as an interface between an application and the physical object itself. But what about objects that don't have a physical counterpart?

The syntax for calling the method of an object is very similar to setting or retrieving a property value.

So, we have a telephone object, which defines the characteristics of any telephone. For a particular instance of the object - that is, a real physical telephone - values are associated to the properties that describe the characteristics of that one telephone.

To begin our look at programming with objects, let's use our trusty telephone object again. Being a technophile and always needing to have the latest and greatest, you have even hooked up your telephone to your computer. Now you want to be able to do something with it.

Some of you may have heard terms like "object oriented programming", "object models", and similar. In order for us to understand what these terms mean, we first need to look at the word found at the core of each of them: object.