Marcello
I like ADO over ODBC .. and each database has its own Ado ( oledb ) client that will need to be present on each workstation running your application.
Ms Sql Server has native OLEDB client support out of the box and has been present in every Windows OS since Win98 including Windows 8. When I started using Enterprise RDMS's, I chose Ms Sql Server because I did not have to worry about distributing a workstation client.
The code is the same whether you connect to Oracle, dB2, Sql Server which makes your code transparent. The only difference is the connection string which is different for each database as well as the oledb ( ado ) client.
Here is the FiveWin wiki on the subject and code examples.
Rick Lipkin
http://wiki.fivetechsoft.com/doku.php?i ... ted_stuffs