SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

RDO vs. ADO

What are the performance implications of using RDO over ADO? Fat client two tier application.

Depends. If you are using ODBC only RDO is probably a bit faster. It’s just a thin wrapper for ODBC. But Microsoft is no longer adding any new functionality to ODBC and if I remember correctly RDO won’t be available in Visual Basic 7 either. So Microsoft is moving away from odbc (and rdo) to oledb and ado.net instead. Using ADO you would have more flexibility and more support for the future. Still I don’t see odbc disappearing in quite a while. /Argyle

Using ADO allows you to use OLE DB and DSN-less connections, which also help provide additional performance. ——————
Brad M. McGehee
Webmaster
SQL-Server-Performance.Com

I had tested the same in one of my applications. Due to the application requirement, we had to show a list of 10000 records on a list box. With RDO, the same application was taking almost 3-4 minutes, with ADO, the same finished in less than 10 secs. I guess this will give u an idea of high performance of ADO. The structure of ADO is pretty flat as well. I mean there is no hierarchy that used to exist in RDO. So coding is faster and also there are numerous settings that u can do when u use ADO which will increase performance. HTH. Gaurav

We had an application where RDO outperformed ADO, it was twice as fast. But I guess that only shows that there are a lot more things that affect performance than just the choice of either RDO/ADO. Things like how you actually use the RDO/ADO interfaces in an optimal way, how you design your application and database, how you use indexes etc. But again, ADO is the future safe alternative. /Argyle

Another thing is that RDO is biased to relational databases where as ADO isn’t, if you’re using RDO for files and even Access I think it might be a little slower. Cheers
Shaun World Domination Through Superior Software

Hi How about using DSN with RDO? Is it better than ADO in this case?
Also, my application resides on Win NT 4.0 with SQL 6.5 DB.
I am wondering if switching the code from RDO to ADO will help me.
TIA,
Pauline.

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