FreeTDS Development Group

["Brian Bruns" <camber AT ais.org>]

> >
> >
> >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

We used to do that too, but these days you still need sql.h and sqlext.h
from somewhere, but it's quite capable of running direct linked given
that.

Brian