OLE DB table functions

Microsoft® OLE DB is a set of application programming interfaces through which applications can uniformly access data that is stored in diverse information sources. OLE DB is conceptually divided into OLE DB consumers and OLE DB providers. An OLE DB provider is a software component that exposes OLE DB interfaces, and an OLE DB consumer is the application that accesses the OLE DB interfaces and consumes the data.

With the DB2® database system, you can simplify the creation of OLE DB applications by defining table functions that access OLE DB data sources and extract data from them. DB2 is an OLE DB consumer that can access any OLE data provider. You can perform operations including GROUP BY, JOIN, and UNION on data sources that expose their data through OLE DB interfaces. For example, you can define an OLE DB table function to return a table from a Microsoft Access database or a Microsoft Exchange address book. You can then create a report that seamlessly combines data from this OLE DB table function with data in your DB2 database.

Using OLE DB table functions reduces your application development effort by providing built-in access to any OLE DB provider. With OLE DB table functions, a generic built-in OLE DB consumer interfaces with any OLE DB provider to retrieve data. You only need to register a table function as LANGUAGE OLEDB, and refer to the OLE DB provider and the relevant rowset as a data source. You do not have to do any function programming to take advantage of OLE DB table functions.

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