[account-5]

I feel the same about MS Access databases, for databases obviously. Provided you kept within its limitations, and actually used relational models, it was really quick at setting up a database program. I never used VB6 but the workflow sounds similar.

[transfire]

It was almost exactly the same expect in VB you had use some esoteric code to access databases — and they kept changing what was the “proper” way to do it. (I think by the time I quit VB it was ADO?)

[int_19h]

It was indeed ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) - Connection, Command, Recordset etc - and this is also the API used by Access.

Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without having confusing naming for its APIs, so the one before ADO was called DAO (Data Access Objects).

There was also some very confusing layering in play. ADO didn't work with the database directly - it was a layer on top of either ODBC or OLE DB, depending on the database.

[jemmyw]

I don't recall it being particularly esoteric. There were libraries to call various databases. In my first job I converted a vb6 application from Foxpro to SQL server. I was just getting into Ruby on Rails at the time and wrote a COM library the the data layer that was somewhat like activerecord, and ended up using it from ruby scripts. Fun times. Just looked it up and the software still seems to be being sold 20 years later.

[akoster]

I agree! I still sometimes use LibreOffice Base for quick prototyping [0] or Microsoft Access if I am on Windows. It uses HSQLDB by default but you can connect to several external JDBC, ODBC and ADO compatible databases, though I often use DBeaver for that purpose. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice_Base

[1] https://dbeaver.io/