Re: Linux and ODBC

David Sisk wrote:
>
> 2) Are there ODBC drivers that will allow a Linux client to talk to an
> Oracle database. The answer is "no" (at least, not to my knowledge). ODBC
> as (client software) does not exist for any platform other than Microsoft
> Windows (again, to my knowledge). Consider the Oracle precompilers, Oracle
> OCI, JDBC, etc.

Well, there are in fact two Open Source ODBC projects under way. Have a look at http://www.iodbc.org and http://genix.net/unixODBC/ as well as http://users.ids.net/~bjepson/freeODBC/ .

If it's not ODBC, what other standardized way of accessing database servers is there? AFAIK, there is none except for OLEDB, which is a lot more proprietary. ODBC, at least, conforms mostly to the X/Open CLI standard and can be implemented on most OSes, whereas OLEDB requires COM/DCOM (which, btw, has also been ported to Linux).

IMHO, Linux would work very well as platform for Application Servers (middle ware - CORBA or DCOM). This means that it would be used as both, client (for the database part) and server (for the user machines). So, asking for ODBC drivers on Linux is not so far fetched as it may seem at first. Who wants to code against proprietary access protocols?

Karl

   Karl Waclawek
   KD Soft Inc.

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