ODBC Benefits ?

Question

I beleive that ODBC has gotten to a certain point that makes it more reliable and queit portable. Needless to mention that there arent too many oppurtunities for Speed optimization if one should consider using a direct RDBMS API.

In Addition, ODBC abstraction, to some sense, does make codes writing portable, having said that, Migrating to new RDBMS won't requiere complete code rewrite!

Nevertheless, a direct API deal can outpass ODBC performances, hence deal with the specific RDBMS low level constraints, as such, gaining full features access.

What do you think of this ?

Answer 1

I think you would get better overall flexibility in using ORM framework, like Hibernate or such (depending on the programming environment)...

Answer 2

The querries sent through ODBC are not trully portable unless you use the dreaded ODBC Escape Sequences. Even then, the 'portable' part is only a small subset of the SQL grammar (eg. no DDL).

Frankly, I never seen a project succeed at this. At best they support a set of tested drivers, like SQL/Oracle/DB2 and that's it. A much better approach is to abstract your application data access layer and provide a different implementation for each back-end you support.