Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

ODBC Rocks

I read the article entitled “ODBC Rocks” on the CoDe Magazine website and I wanted to comment on it. The full article is at “http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=990712172&page=1”. This is a very good article written by Chris Lee who is a Program Manager at Microsoft. Chris made some very good points:

1. "Fifteen years after its launch, ODBC is a firmly entrenched cornerstone of the software industry.”
2. "For the data source owner, ODBC is a must.”
3. "At the time of its release, the SQL Server team at Microsoft believed OLE DB would supersede ODBC. This is no longer the case and ODBC’s future is completely secure.”

If you read my blog post of September 24th, “http://blogs.simba.com/simba_technologies_ceo_co/odbc/index.html”, I discussed why an ISV would want to build an ODBC Driver. Chris says that “for the data source owner ODBC, is a must,” and I could not agree more. If you build an ODBC driver for whatever data source you have, the data source is now open to the widest set of applications possible. This is the biggest win for any data source owner.  The more applications that your data source is exposed to, the more valuable your data source.  The business case for an ODBC driver is irrefutable.

Why build an ODBC Driver?

I often get asked by people as to why you would want to build an ODBC Driver.  Usually the people asking work for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) that have their own database and/or reporting application.

I usually provide the following example.

Consider an ISV that sells into the financial services sector and has been making great progress licensing its proprietary database and reporting application.  The ISV’s database is high performing and very scalable.  Likewise, it has a great reporting tool that allows the customer to do some fancy analytics on the data in the database.  Overall, the product’s code is well-developed and high quality.  Everything is very modular, and everything looks good.

However, the ISV’s CEO is reviewing business and finds that the company is making largely departmental sales and that most customers only have 5-10 users of its great system.  The CEO asks one of the company’s best customers – a major bank – why it is not deploying the product further than the 10 users it has.  The customer says that it loves the system, but its other departments that could use the system want to connect to it using Microsoft Excel and Business Objects Crystal Reports.  The problem is that data needs to be extracted from the system and then fed into Excel and Crystal through flat files.

This data connectivity problem is exactly what an ODBC Driver solves.  An ISV might have a great system, yet unless standard business query, reporting and analytical applications like Excel and Crystal can connect, the system will always only serve a niche role with data stored in the system that is trapped in a silo. 

Quite simply, an ODBC Driver allows a wide variety of applications to connect to a database through a standard interface and exposes the data to the maximum number of products and users.