On (06 Aug 97) Neil Heller wrote to Chris Downs...
 NH> Does that mean that ONE ODBC driver could (theoretically) be used to
 NH> interrogate databases from several different vendors (Oracle, IBM, M$,
 NH> etc)?  That would be slick.  I wonder how close that ever came to
 NH> being realized?
That depends a bit on what you mean by "ODBC driver".  The general idea
is that there's one ODBC DLL that centralizes much of the ODBC
capabilties, then there are drivers for individual types of databases.
This allows one to write a driver for a new type of database with a
minimum of new code.  (A bit like inheritance, though only a bit.)
However, this allows an end-user program to completely transparently
work with lots of different data sources.  In fact, the program doesn't
have to know anything about the storage format of the data being stored.
In fact, if you write a program now, and a new data format is invented
years from now, your current code could still work with that new format
as long as they decide to write an ODBC driver for that format.
Oh, and FWIW, yes, some ODBC drivers DO support more than one format of
database, but that's more or less beside the point.
    Later,
    Jerry.
... The Universe is a figment of its own imagination.
--- PPoint 1.90
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