The driving force behind Active Server technologies is data access. In order to develop a truly dynamic web site developers need to allow users to access data on demand. Luckily, with Microsoft's Active Server Pages, this is exceedingly easy to do. This article for ASP beginners details how to connect to a SQL Server 7.0 database using ActiveX Data Object (ADO) and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

When faced with learning a new technology, it's common to try and reproduce the basic functionality you're used to in the old one. In doing that with ADO.NET and trying to reproduce the basics or the recordset object, this article discusses the new and many uses of ADO.NET's DataView object.

The author writes "CoverYourASP's original database administration tool didn't look for foreign keys, and just displayed a confusing list of primary key values. Now, it's been improved with automatically generated list boxes." This tutorial explains how to turn those foreign keys into list boxes automatically.

This article provides sample source code for a user query parser which allows users to submit full-text search queries from ASP to SQL Server 2000. Full source code available for download.

It is somewhat ironic that the most confusing part of creating and executing a SQL statement from ASP is determining where to put the quotes. When is a single quote used? When is a double quote used? When are they used together? Which takes precedence? This article will answer these questions.

This article presents three modular routines to access and fetch data easier with ASP. Topics include: Fetching a Recordset, An alternative to the GetConnectedRecordSet function that opens a connection, fetches a recordset, and immediately closes the connection, and Utilities for Creating Valid SQL Statements.

This 4-page tutorial shows all the basics of using Active Server Pages and VBScript to work with databases. It covers Connecting to the Database, Working With Recordsets, and more.

AddCriteria is a small function that simplifies the code needed to produce a SQL query from a set of optional criteria posted by a user. This article explains how to use this function.

This sample ASP Web database can give you ideas about tying everything together and can even be used as a starting point for a Web project.

Have this short program around so that you can quickly see what columns and what data are in your database. Here you will see some of the common methods and properties used to limit the results from your SQL query. Using a simple form that takes a table name and a submit button, and you can easily display increments of the table data. Full source code available.