The UNICOM Intelligence OLE DB Provider (mrOleDB.dll), also referred to as the Provider), uses the ATL OLE DB Provider Templates to implement many of its OLE DB interfaces. The OLE DB Provider Templates support the OLE DB version 1.1 specifications and can implement a level-0 compliant provider. However, a number of custom OLE DB interfaces have been implemented because the OLE DB Provider templates do not support dynamic rowsets and transactions.

In addition, the UNICOM Intelligence OLE DB Provider has a DataLinkHelper class, which provides a number of useful helper functions, including a method that displays the Data Link Properties dialog box. In UNICOM Intelligence Data Model 2.7 this class has two methods: DisplayMetadataVersions and GetConnectionStringProperties. In UNICOM Intelligence Data Model 2.9, a further method, DisplayWizardEx, was added. For more information, see IDataLinkHelper.

The OLE DB provider architecture includes a data source object and one or more sessions. The data source object is the initial object the provider instantiates. When a consumer application needs data, it cocreates the data source object to start the provider. The data source object creates a session object (using the IDBCreateSession interface) through which the consumer connects to the data source object. In ODBC programming terms, the data source object is equivalent to the HENV and the session object is equivalent to the HDBC. A session object corresponds to the OLE DB TSession.

There are mandatory and optional interfaces defined by OLE DB for several types of objects: