ODBC and Related Programming Interfaces
The ODBC API programming standard was developed and
championed by Microsoft to provide a single programming API to
all of the commercial SQL databases, as well as to head off a
competing industry standard that Microsoft did not control.
Microsoft won, and uses ODBC to promote other Microsoft
database products at every turn.
Most Windows programmers use ODBC to connect to SQL
databases. In actuality, ODBC is not too bad: it offers almost
all of the basic features and functions that one might hope for
in an SQL database API. Its only peculiarity and bizarrness is
it's insistance on using "handles": a programming anachronism
that Windows can't seem to shake. Despite this oddity, ODBC is
a workable programming interface for Unix programmers, and is
probably the best bet for anyone wishing to write code that can
connnect to dozens of different databases. There's a good
selection of alternatives, as seen below.
- unixODBC
-
unixODBC provides
ODBC support for Gnu/Linux. C/C++. Dual license: GPL
and LGPL, allows both free and commercial uses. Appears
to include drivers for more than a dozen databases,
including most major commercial and free databases.
(UDB, DB2, Sybase, Informix, AdabasD, Postgres, MySQL,
MiniSQL, Empress, YARD, Interbase, Linter, Mimer, among
others.) Includes a graphical ODBC Driver Manager, and
a graphical data explorer.
Commercial support via EasySoft.
- iODBC
-
iODBC is a
LGPL'ed implementation of ODBC conforming to the
Microsoft and X/Open SQL CLI (Call Level Interface)
specifications. Language wrappers available for PHP and
Perl, C++, Java, Python, TCL, others. Dozens of drivers
available, mostly for commercial databases. Ported to
dozens of different Unixes, including HP/UX, IRIX,
MacOS classic, MacOS X, SCO, Sequent, Solaris,
Unixware, AIX, FreeBSD, DG/UX and even OpenVMS.
This project appears to be an open-sourcing of the
one of the ODBC
products from OpenLink Software,
which appears to continue to be actively involved in
the maintenance of this project, and appears to offer
commercial support for these interfaces. There's a fair
amount of blurring between what's part of iODBC, and
what's an OpenLink product, and the site encourages you
to explore other OpenLink products.
- ODBC++
-
ODBC++ provides
a set of cross-platform C++ class libraries for ODBC
access. Uses a thread-safe design, allows
multi-threaded execution. LGPL.
- FreeODBC++
-
FreeODBC++ provided
LGPL'ed C++ ODBC interfaces for Gnu/Linux, FreeBSD and
Windows. The C++ interfaces are based on/derived from
the JDBC class hierarchy, and thus implements a good
subset of JDBC in C++. On Unix, this is built on top of
unixODBC, and
thus offers the same driver selection.
- sqlxx
-
SQLxx provides
some simple C++ iODBC wrappers for postgres and MySQL.
LGPL.
- FreeTDS
-
FreeTDS implements
the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol that is used by
Sybase and Windows clients to communicate with database
servers. The native interface is C, and there are Perl
and PHP wrappers for FreeTDS. There is also a FreeTDS
driver for the JDBC 1 and 2 API's. The code is LGPL'ed,
allowing commercial software to be developed on top of
it. Uses a modern automake-based build system.
Browsable CVS on sourceforge. This is a good choice if
you know that all of your data will be on the Microsoft
SQL Server.
- OTL
-
OTL provides
a C++ STL stream iterator interface to ODBC, Oracle and
DB2. STL is, of course, the Standard Template Library
for C++. If you use STL, this is the thing for you.
- DTL
-
DTL makes
ODBC recordsets look like an STL container. It provides
standard STL iterators. Include C++ reflection
(introspection??) support, thus automatically providing
data-dictionary/dynamic runtime discovery.
- OpenLink ODBC
- An ODBC
client library is available from OpenLink Software.
Provides Gnu/Linux support for Oracle, Sybase, Progress,
Ingres and Informix with their client libraries.
|
