ODBC (Mike OShea)

[ryan at bulldogsoftware.com]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 03:45:52PM -0800, Bill Campbell said:

> As I understand ODBC, it's basically a shim that translates the
> client's database requests into SQL that the target database
> understands.  This is also basically how the perl DBI and python
> database abstraction layers work.

Thats one way of putting it. But it is also serves as a interpreter of
metadata, or you might even say meta-metadata. On one level you have a
slew of configuration type queries such as "what ODBC version are you, can
you do transactions, is this read only", etc. and then you have the actual
metadata queries to determine everything from the number of fields down
to the exact definition of an integer.

This is why the ODBC layer is slow by nature, it asks too many questions. :-)

In theory you could plug some SQL clients into SQL servers and let fly, but
in practice you would end up with either no standardization or a handful of
proprietary solutions.

-- 
Ryan Powers
Bulldog Software, Inc.
http://www.bulldogsoftware.com
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