The ODBC Driver Manager manages the communications between the user applications and ODBC Drivers. Typically, user applications are linked against the ODBC Driver Manager. Then, the Driver Manager manages the job of loading and unloading the appropriate ODBC Driver for the application. Applications make ODBC calls to the ODBC Driver Manager, which performs basic error checking and then processes these calls or passes them on to the underlying ODBC Driver.
The ODBC Driver Manager is not a required component, but it exists to solve many issues surrounding ODBC application development and deployment. Some advantages of using an ODBC Driver Manager are:
Portable data access: Applications do not need to be rebuilt to use a different DBMS.
Runtime binding to a data source.
Ability to easily change a data source.
To use the ASE ODBC Driver without using the ODBC Driver Manager, you can link your application directly with the ASE ODBC Driver library. Then the resulting executable can connect to only ASE data sources.
An ODBC Driver Manager is not included with the ASE ODBC Driver. Typically an ODBC Driver Manager is installed when you install the operating system. Also there are multiple open source and commercial implementations of ODBC Driver Manager available. The ASE ODBC Driver works with any ODBC Driver Manager implementation.
The ASE ODBC Driver has been tested with the following ODBC Driver Managers:
On Windows, the Microsoft ODBC Driver Manager that is included with Windows
On Linux, the unixODBC Driver Manager that is included with Red Hat and SuSE
On Mac OS X, the iODBC Driver Manager that is included with Mac OS X
