ODBC Requirements and Supported Platforms

The ODBC interface is a call-based application programming interface defined by Microsoft Corporation as a standard interface to database management systems on Microsoft Windows.

In addition, ODBC is now widely used on many non-Windows platforms, such as Linux.

Software Requirements

To write ODBC applications for Adaptive Server Enterprise, you need:

Adaptive Server Enterprise
A C compiler capable of creating programs for your environment
ODBC Software Development Kit (SDK):
- On Windows platform the operating system together with the Visual Studio compiler provide all required components. Alternatively, install the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC).
- For non-Windows platforms, there are commercial and open source projects such as unixODBC and iODBC that provide the ODBC SDK, including the ODBC Driver Manager and header files. Linux operating system includes such open source distributions.
- On HP HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Sun Solaris, you can use the iAnywhere ODBC Driver Manager, which is included in your Adaptive Server ODBC Driver installation. You can also use other commercial or open source distributions of the ODBC SDK, however, to do so, you must install them separately.
  
  Note: The iAnywhere ODBC Driver Manager does not map calls to ODBC versions 1.0 and 2.0 to calls to ODBC version 3.x. Applications using the iAnywhere ODBC Driver Manager must restrict their use of the ODBC feature set to versions 3.0 and later.

Supported Platforms

See the Open Server and SDK New Features for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and UNIX for a list of platforms on which Adaptive Server ODBC Driver is available.

Note: Significant portions of this book deal with writing C programs to access data using ODBC functions with Adaptive Server ODBC Driver. There are utilities, programs, and 4GL RAD tools that can use ODBC connections. For example, you can write a PowerBuilder® application or a PHP Web page that connects to an ODBC datasource. For such uses, you only need to know how to set up a datasource using Adaptive Server ODBC Driver. Once the datasource has been set up, these tools completely abstract the underlying ODBC function calls.