Project "Accessing ODBC Databases from Oberon Programs" of Christoph Steindl


Description

ODBC is a call level interface to databases which has been defined by Microsoft Corp. In contrast to embedded SQL and PL/SQL, programs using ODBC are meant to be database independent. This is achieved by a driver manager which passes the calls from the application program to the database. The ODBC library contains function calls that allow an application to connect to a DBMS, execute SQL statements, and retrieve results. Furthermore it defines standard error codes and standard data types. While embedded SQL is efficient and portable across different hardware and operating systems, the source code must be recompiled for each new environment. Additionally the program is tightly coupled with the database it was compiled for. There is no need for implementation specific transformations on the source code of ODBC programs (such as pre-processing).
ODBC is more flexible than embedded SQL in the sense that the same programs (object code) can be used to access different DBMSs and can ignore underlying data communications protocols between it and a DBMS.


Publications


Download the ODBC package