12.1.3- What is ODBC?

What is ODBC?

Open DataBase Connectivity, or ODBC, is a standard for accessing data. It was designed to allow the programmer to use a common set of routines to access the data stored in databases, regardless of the type of database in which the data was stored. This meant that once the programmer was connected to the database using ODBC, they could manipulate the data without worrying exactly where the data was stored, or which type of database was storing it. It provided interface transparency – so the programmer could access an Oracle database in the same way that they accessed a SQL Server database:

There's no common format for saving databases to file, so you can't save a database using one database application and then directly open the same file using a different database application (in the way that a word-processed file in the .txt format can be opened and read as plain text in NotePad, WordPad, Microsoft Word, or whatever).

Fortunately, all sorts of database applications store data using the structure we've already seen: tables, records, and keys. ODBC allows you to get at this data without worrying about the nuts and bolts of the hosting database application.

So, ODBC allows you to get at the basic information held in any database. This gives the programmer freedom to concentrate on the functionality of the application without worrying too much about the underlying data, or even how to access it.