Overview of ODBC
Go Up to Programming Applications with ODBC
Microsoft standard, similar in intent to the BDE, is called Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). One standard API provides a unified interface for applications to access data from any data source for which an ODBC driver is available. The InterBase client for Windows platforms includes a 32-bit client library for developing and executing applications that access data via ODBC. The driver is in the file iscdrv32.dll. The ODBC driver follows the ODBC 3.5 specification, which includes the 2.0 and 3.0 specifications.
You configure a data source using the ODBC Administrator tool, much as you do in BDE. If you need to access InterBase databases from third party products that do not have InterBase drivers, you need to install this ODBC driver. The install program then asks you if you want to configure any ODBC data sources. “Configuring” means providing the complete path to any databases that you know you will need to access from non-InterBase-aware products, along with the name of the ODBC driver for InterBase.
ODBC is the common language of data-driven client software. Some software products make use of databases, but do not yet have specific support for InterBase. In such cases, they issue data queries that conform to a current SQL standard. This guarantees that these requests can be understood by any compliant database. The ODBC driver then translates these generic requests into InterBase-specific code. Other ODBC drivers access other vendors’ databases.
Microsoft Office, for example, does not have the technology to access InterBase databases directly, but it can use the ODBC driver that is on the InterBase CDROM.
You do not need to install an ODBC driver if you plan to access your InterBase databases only from InterBase itself or from products such as Delphi, C++Builder, and JBuilder that use either native InterBase programming components or SQL-Links components to query InterBase data.
JDBC and InterClient are covered in Programming with JDBC.
Configuring an ODBC Driver
To access the ODBC Administrator on Windows machines, display the Control Panel and choose ODBC. (In some cases, it appears as “32-Bit ODBC Administrator”).