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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
