Dear Richard;
I do thank you for the efforts you put in Access seminars and I found it very helpful and informative but frankly I'm a little bit confused when listening to your Access seminar 320 for you mentioned that DAO is GOOD and ADO is BAD (lesson 1. Recordset Basic, in frame time 13:12) whereas I've read a book titled ACCESS 2007 FOR DUMMIES (Chapter 5: Using SQL and Recordsets, section Recordsets and Object Model page 665) saying the contrary, below is the quote from the book:

"Because Access offers two different object models for the purpose of working with recordsets, you may find recordsets confusing. One is DAO (Data Access Objects); the other is ADO (ActiveX Data Objects). The DAO model is the older of the two. DAO works only with Access tables. ADO, the newer of the two, works either with Access tables or external data sources, such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.
At first glance you may think, “Well, I’ll never use external data sources, so I’ll stick with the DAO object model.” Picking an object model, though, isn’t that easy. The newer ADO model is currently favored by Microsoft, meaning that ADO will continue to grow and get better while DAO remains in maintenance mode, which generally spells doom for a technology. If a technology is in maintenance mode today that pretty much guarantees that it won’t exist at all in the not-too-distant future.
Given the bias of Microsoft, we stick with ADO in this book."

For me, I understand that DAO is used for Access only and ADO is more generic as you mentioned in Access 323 but I need to hear your opinion in this issue, which one is the best DAO or ADO take into consideration Access 2007 and 2010?

Thank you

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Reply from Richard Rost:

I go into much more detail in my seminars and lessons, but basically DAO is a model that is more specific to Access and gives you more control over Access - including design of the tables. ADO is more generic, applies to other database types, and can be used in online databases (like I show in my ASP classes). Both are just fine for basic use. I actually mix and match between them a lot. Microsoft is actually focusing on DAO for the future even though it is the older of the two standards. I personally say it can't hurt to learn them BOTH.