ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a standard call level interface (CLI) developed by Microsoft. It is based on the SQL Access Group CLI specification. ODBC applications can run against any data source that provides an ODBC driver. ODBC is a good choice for a programming interface if you want your application to be portable to other data sources that have ODBC drivers.

ODBC is a low-level interface. Almost all the SQL Anywhere functionality is available with this interface. ODBC is available as a DLL under Windows operating systems with the exception of Windows Mobile. It is provided as a library for Unix.

The primary documentation for ODBC is the Microsoft ODBC Software Development Kit.

ODBC applications

You can develop applications using a variety of development tools and programming languages, as shown in the figure below, and accessing the SQL Anywhere database server using the ODBC API.

For example, of the applications supplied with SQL Anywhere, InfoMaker and PowerDesigner Physical Data Model use ODBC to connect to the database.

See also

• SQL Anywhere ODBC API