Dim oDAL As New cDAL
Dim oRec As New cRecordset
Set oRec = oDAL.OpenRecordset("Employees")
oRec.MoveFirst
MsgBox oRec.Fields("FirstName").Value
Please forgive me for being a bit naughty in using automatically instantiated object variables, but this has been done purely for code readability.
Notice that the details involved in setting up the data connection and finding the data source are all abstracted by the DAL. Internally, the DAL is determining where the Employees data lives and is retrieving the data and creating a custom recordset. In a single-system DAL, the location of the data could be assumed to be in a stored procedure on a Microsoft SQL Server; in a multidata source system, the DAL might be keying into a local database to determine the location and type of the Employees data source. The implementation is dependent upon the requirements of the particular environment.
Also, the operation in the DAL is stateless. After retrieving the recordset, the DAL can be closed down and the recordset can survive independently. This operation is critical when considering moving these components to a hosted environment, such as Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS).
Statelessness is important because it determines whether components will scale. The term scale means that the performance of this object will not degrade when usage of the object is increased. An example of scaling might be moving from two or three users of this object to two or three hundred. A stateless object essentially contains no module-level variables. Each method call is independent and does not rely on any previous operation, such as setting properties or other method calls. Because the object has no internal state to maintain, the same copy of the object can be reused for many clients. There is no need for each client to have a unique instance of the object, which also allows products such as Microsoft Transaction Server to provide high-performance caching of these stateless components.