Data Access Objects

Jet Data Access Objects is a deprecated general programming interface for database access on Microsoft Windows systems.

DAO were originally called VT Objects. DAO 1.0 came up in November 1992. In version 3.5 it was able to bypass the Jet engine altogether and directly access ODBC data sources, including Microsoft SQL Server and other enterprise database systems. DAO 3.6 was the final version developed by Microsoft. Microsoft says that DAO will not be available in its future 64-bit operating systems. Versions of the DAO library prior to 3.6 are not provided or supported in Microsoft Access 2013.

DAO works by creating a "Workspace" object in which all database operations are performed. The workspace object exists as a session object that exists within a larger database engine object. There are two types of database engines: a Jet database engine object, and an ODBCDirect database engine.

The Jet database engine object consists of several objects:

The ODBCDirect database engine consists of a workspace object and an errors object. The main differences between this database engine and the Jet database engine are:

The ODBC connection objects consist of QueryDef objects and recordset objects.

DAO object model diagram with links to class reference pages

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