Re: ODBC Driver for DOS

On Tue, 11 Feb 1997 14:21:49 GMT, Jared Hecker <jared_at_hwai.com> posted:
>>I am looking for an ODBC Driver for DOS.
>>I am not sure whether there is any ODBC Driver for DOS or not, but I heard
>>it might.
>>If anyone has any information about this, I will appreciate a lot.
>>
>>The reason I need an ODBC Driver for DOS is that my DOS program needs to
>>interact with a database that runs on windows. I also heard that ODBC is an
>>way to do it if any exist for DOS.
 

>Maria -
>
>ODBC was written for Windoze exclusively, unfortunately. If you are trying
>to communicate with an Oracle database, there exists SQL*Net drivers for
>DOS.
ODBC is known in the official literature as "SQL-CLI," and is most definitely *not* a protocol written "for Windoze only." See URL http://www.jcc.com/sql_cli.html for more details on this.

There exist ODBC drivers for a variety of operating systems; Windoze support is almost universal. (There's probably a database that offers ODBC support that *doesn't* support some variant of MS-Windows; that's pretty much going to be a pathological case created to make trouble.)

But there is a Perl project that provides a portable ODBC interface which can apparently be modified to speak to most databases; it's relatively UNIX-oriented.

There are a goodly number of databases that provide UNIX-based ODBC support; probably most of them.

Unfortunately for MS-DOS users, MS-DOS is indeed not typically supported by ODBC. MS-DOS isn't really a terribly stable platform for it; more importantly SQL-CLI was developed at a time when MS-DOS was beginning to be deprecated as a platform for new development.

-- 
Christopher B. Browne, cbbrowne_at_unicomp.net, chris_browne_at_sdt.com
"When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at
you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*" 
  - Linus Torvalds      URL: http://www.conline.com/~cbbrowne/