What is ODBC?

Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC) is an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows a programmer to abstract a program from a database. When writing code to interact with a database, you usually have to add code that talks to a particular database using a proprietary language. If you want your program to talk to an Access, Fox and Oracle databases you have to code your program with three different database languages. This can be quite the daunting task causing much grief. Now, enter ODBC...

When programming to interact with ODBC you only need to talk the ODBC language (a combination of ODBC API function calls and the SQL language). The ODBC Manager will figure out how to contend with the type of database you are targeting. Regardless of the database type you are using, all of your calls will be to the ODBC API.