CS 112D Lecture Notes - Connecting to Oracle and Access Databases

You can use VB and ADO.NET to connect to any database, as long as you have a Data Provider for it. We'll look at two common examples: Oracle and Access
These two data providers are mentioned in the book ADO.NET Programming in Visual Basic .NET by Steve Holzner and Bob Howell, Prentice Hall, 2003. (Which is slightly more advanced than our textbook)
Here are a few pages on this topic from Holzner and Howell that I scanned in for you to read: pages 106-107 and page 108. It'll be easiest to read these pages as full-size images. In newer versions of Internet Explorer, you'll have to hold your mouse over the image and click on the resize icon that appears in the lower-right corner of the image.
New since the publication of this book and your texbook, there is now an Oracle-specific Data Provider in the namespace: System.Data.OracleClient
Here is a zip file containing a project that connects to the Miscrosoft Access "Northwind" sample database