FreeTDS Development Group

[Peter Harvey <pharvey AT codebydesign.com>]

> extending your support in the future to additional databases ODBC is an
> attractive option, although you introduce a bit of overhead for the driver
> manager, and our implementation, while improving, still requires some
> work.  The primary advantage would be a single executable capable of
> working against either database using FreeTDS's ODBC driver or MyODBC for
> MySQL.  The other downside however is a dependance on the driver manager.
>
>  

One *could* leave out the driver manager, either by having the 
application dynamically load/call the driver or by creating a seperate 
executable for each DBMS. The latter was common on UNIX until some free 
driver managers started to appear (i.e. unixODBC). You still get 
portable code but you lose the two most important things the driver 
manager provides; 1) transparent access to drivers and 2) conformance 
level mapping.

Just depends upon what your priorities are. Like Brian says - the more 
DBMS's you want to support the more attractive ODBC appears.

Peter