SQL For Dummies®, 7th Edition

Chapter 16. Accessing Data with ODBC and JDBC

In the last several years, computers have become increasingly interconnected, both within and between organizations. With this connection comes the need for sharing database information across networks. The major obstacle to the free sharing of information across networks is the incompatibility of the operating software and applications running on different machines. SQL's creation, and its ongoing evolution, has been a major step toward overcoming hardware and software incompatibility.

Unfortunately, "standard" SQL is not all that standard. Even DBMS vendors who claim to comply with the international SQL standard have included proprietary extensions in their SQL implementations — which make them incompatible with the proprietary extensions in other vendors' implementations. The vendors are loath to give up their extensions because their customers have designed them into their applications and have become dependent on them. User organizations, particularly large ones, need another way to make cross-DBMS communication possible — a tool that doesn't require vendors to dumb down their implementations to the lowest common denominator. This other way is ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity).

ODBC

ODBC is a standard interface between a database and an application that accesses the data in the database. Having a standard enables any application front end to access any database back end by using SQL. The only requirement is that the front end and the ...