Re: ODBC Theory: Why do I still need database specific client drivers?

In article <7889ff69.0205060530.27e09a0d_at_posting.google.com>, maxplunk_at_hotmail.com (Joe F.) wrote:
>According to what I learned in college, if I have any database running
>on any type of server (independant of OS and RDBMS) and it provides an
>ODBC connection, theoretically, any client (ie a program using ODBC
>protocol) should be able to connect to that database and be completely
>unaware of what kind of database it is, as long as it speaks ODBC.
>This is supposed to be a beautiful thing, speaking Esperanto SQL, and
>everyone just gets along together.
>
>So why, in my implementation (which is in Perl using the DBD-ODBC
>module), must I provide a client-side, database-specific ODBC driver?
>Doesn't this defeat the purpose of ODBC?

ODBC is not a protocol, it is a programming interface. As such, it does not specify anything about the actual protocol used to talk to the server.

If you are looking for a standard for database network protocols, look at ISO 9579, which defines that. And there might be an ODBC driver somewhere which uses that protocol. But, to my knowledge, few database vendors support ISO 9579. Actually, I don't know of a single one but would be interested to hear about that.

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Robert Sundström, Mimer SQL Development
Upright Database Technology AB, http://www.mimer.com Received on Mon May 06 2002 - 20:19:02 CEST