13 Facts About ODBC

The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems.

An application written using ODBC can be ported to other platforms, both on the client and server side, with few changes to the data access code.

ODBC accomplishes DBMS independence by using an ODBC driver as a translation layer between the application and the DBMS.

ODBC was originally developed by Microsoft and Simba Technologies during the early 1990s, and became the basis for the Call Level Interface standardized by SQL Access Group in the Unix and mainframe field.

ODBC retained several features that were removed as part of the CLI effort.

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Full ODBC was later ported back to those platforms, and became a de facto standard considerably better known than CLI.

Unlike the later ODBC, Blueprint was a purely code-based system, lacking anything approximating a command language like SQL.

Some of this was unavoidable due to the path that the calls took through the Jet-based stack; ODBC calls to SQL databases were first converted from Simba Technologies's SQL dialect to Jet's internal C-based format, then passed to a driver for conversion back into SQL calls for the database.

ODBC remains in wide use today, with drivers available for most platforms and most databases.

The virtualization that ODBC offers is no longer a strong requirement, and development of ODBC is no longer as active as it once was.

ODBC is based on the device driver model, where the driver encapsulates the logic needed to convert a standard set of commands and functions into the specific calls required by the underlying system.

An ODBC driver enables an ODBC-compliant application to use a data source, normally a DBMS.

ODBC drivers exist for most DBMSs, including Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase ASE, SAP HANA and IBM Db2.