Who Uses OLE DB Technology?

(As posted on Microsoft site)

The OLE DB interfaces are useful to all software vendors whose products manage data in some way. Since OLE DB provides a way for any type of data store to expose its data in a standard, tabular form, new opportunities will arise that don't exist today. Some examples are discussed here:

• The health care industry makes extensive use of the MUMPS database. The format of MUMPS does not allow easy integration with other data stores and, as a result, is a barrier to the development of new systems that can access the old.
• Profitability in the financial services industry is based on a trader's ability to receive, analyze, and complete trades quickly based on an integrated desktop. Yet developers are constantly dealing with a multitude of real-time data feeds for news and stock with few standards among them, and face a slow, difficult development task as a result.
• In manufacturing, CAD/CAM systems store a plethora of critical data about parts that must be completely up-to-date. Yet it is currently impossible to integrate the part information in a CAD/CAM tool with a manufacturing system's parts database.
• Insurance providers are increasingly deploying integrated desktop applications that combine the power of desktop productivity tools with mainframe-based information, so field office agents can respond to their customers. Yet developers of these kinds of solutions are faced with very different programming models for making these different environments work together.
• Across all businesses, e-mail is becoming a mission-critical information source. Yet it is currently impossible to perform a simple query that would produce all the e-mail interactions in a given month with a business's top ten customers.

There is clearly a need for a new approach to unified data access and manipulation. OLE DB is that new approach. Software vendors who take advantage of the OLE DB capabilities break down into four categories: data providers, data consumers, data service providers, and business component developers. Apollo OLE DB is a data provider.