@lproven for my sins I could probably write half the equivalent history of their data API abstractions.

Only half, because my development became stuck in the aspic of being inside of MS Office - and so I never even migrated to using the .Net interfaces (though other people in my org have done) nor what came after.

A small example: with DAO (data access objects?) you would get how many rows were affected, whereas the replacement ADO simply could not, despite both using the same ODBC driver.