FreeTDS Development Group

[Peter Harvey <pharvey AT codebydesign.com>]

> Hmm.  Maybe I should write something up for the www site, under
> "Entertainment" or something, called "ODBC Considered Harmful".  It would
> save us both time, eh?  :-)

I think there are too many people who comment negatively about ODBC with 
out really knowing enough about it.

Its not;

- for non-tabular data (some not-ported MS standards handle this)
- the fastest method to access data (use your db API for that)

Its good (or even great) at;

- providing a portable API (cross-database and cross-platform)
- leveraging an existing standard (arguably the most commomly used 
standard for accessing relational data)
- optionaly providing version mapping and driver plugabiliy via a driver 
manager

The main problem with ODBC for most people comes from poor drivers not 
from the ODBC standard itself.

Having said this I am VERY happy to see continued improvement of the 
FreeTDS ODBC driver and if someone decides to create the an OLE-DB 
compat. sub-system for Linux/UNIX then great. But lets not trample all 
over ODBC. :)

My fave thing about UNIX is how it leverages past work and is mostly 
based upon great standards. I dislike the way MS completely replaces 
"standard" after "standard".

Now if only there was a real effort to refine/improve the ODBC standard 
perhaps then more people would be happy with it and we can do a little 
less reinventing the wheel and a little more bullet-proofing.

Peter