It was almost exactly the same expect in VB you had use some esoteric code to access databases — and they kept changing what was the “proper” way to do it. (I think by the time I quit VB it was ADO?)
Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without having confusing naming for its APIs, so the one before ADO was called DAO (Data Access Objects).
There was also some very confusing layering in play. ADO didn't work with the database directly - it was a layer on top of either ODBC or OLE DB, depending on the database.