Is Interoperability Achievable With ODBC
Christoph Steindl · 1996
Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a call level interface to databases. In contrast to Embedded SQL and PL/SQL, programs using ODBC are meant to be database independent. This is achieved by an additional layer between the application and the database. In this paper we regard interoperability not as the question if it is at all possible to work with different DBMS's 1 but how easy and convenient it is. We will show that there are some deficiencies in the design of ODBC which reduce the degree of interoperability but also that these can be remedied with moderate effort. 1 Introduction Many applications need to access large amounts of data. Therefore many of them use databases. For a query language, SQL is a widely accepted and used standard. But depending on the degree of integration of SQL into the application there are at least three different ways to bind SQL statements to the application code [Ven95]: ffl Embedded SQL, embedding SQL statements directly into the application code ...