Visual Basic can be very loose with it's data types. If you want to avoid worrying about which type of data is coming from your database, you can simply not specify a datatype when you declare a variable, which defaults the datatype to variant. The variant should be avoided whenever possible, as it can be very CPU and memory intensive. This article demonstrates the different MySQL and VB6 datatypes and how they correlate. (2004-01-22)

Mike Hillyer explains how to work with BLOB columns using the ADO 2.5 stream object. (2003-12-02)

One of the most common sources of trouble for the beginning VB / MySQL developer seems to revolve around which cursor location to use. Related to the cursor location problem is the choice of cursor type and lock type. The purpose of this article is to assist the Visual Basic developer in choosing the proper cursor location, cursor type, and lock type to use when programming Visual Basic (or VB) applications that use MySQL as a back-end database through ADO and Connector/ODBC (MyODBC).(2004-01-22)

Mike Hillyer explains why he thinks Visual Basic and MySQL are an ideal combination for application development, and the motivation for his continuing series of articles on the subject.(2004-01-22)