A brief detail on ODBC: Open Database Connectivity

Very often in web design and development processes, databases are connected with different front-end applications. ODBC or Open Database Connectivity is the utility that helps in establishing those database connections. It is primarily an open standard Application Programming Interface or API for accessing a database.

ODBC is a step towards platform independent data-access environment. ODBC helps in diminishing the need for programmers engaged in the development of website or applications to learn multiple application programming interfaces. With ODBC, application programmers can allow an application to concurrently modify, access and view from multiple, diverse databases. As per ODBC specification, a developer can either develop an ODBC-enabled "front-end" or "client" desktop application or an ODBC driver for the backend server or the database.

To use ODBC, the following components are required:

ODBC Client - An ODBC-enabled front-end or client developed using any front-end development tool such as Visual Basic or Lotus.

ODBC DRIVER ' The ODBC Driver Catalog contains a large list of available drivers. For example, to connect with Informix database one needs the Informix-ODBC driver and so on.

DBMS/RDBMS Server -  The server is the database (such as MS-Access or MS-SQL Server) with which the front-end interacts with the help of the ODBC Driver.

For Java-based web designing and development environment, ODBC is used by bridging with JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) interface. These are:

JDBC-ODBC Bridge - A JDBC-ODBC Bridge consists of a JDBC driver which uses an ODBC driver to connect to the designated database.

ODBC-JDBC Bridge - An ODBC-JDBC Bridge consists of an ODBC driver which takes the services of a JDBC driver to connect to the designated database.

The various ODBC APIs (from different vendors or groups) are as follows:

• Microsoft ODBC
• iODBC (Open-source)
• IBM i5/OS (for DB2)
• UnixODBC
• UDBC (cross-platform)

In simpler words, a DataBase secures relational integrity of data in an application and ODBC does the vital job of connecting the database to the application system.

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