ODBC Drivers

If you are new to the concept of Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC), you might benefit from a brief analogy between ODBC drivers and Microsoft Windows printer drivers.

Windows Printer Drivers

Before Windows printer driver support, developers of DOS programs had to write their own printer support for each printer model that they wanted to support. Additionally, every company developing DOS software products had to independently duplicate this effort because there was no standard method available that allowed different software manufacturers to make use of the printer support developed by another manufacturer.

With the development of Windows printer drivers, printer support is now handled much more efficiently. Instead of each program having its own support for a large variety of printers, the drivers either come with Windows, are made available from the printer manufacturers, or are made by a software company, such as Seagull Scientific, Inc. Because of printer drivers, different word processors, spreadsheets, databases and other programs can all output to these printers without each having their own built-in support for every printer.

ODBC Drivers

Just as the pre-Windows developers needed to write support code for each printer model used by their programs, contemporary developers have traditionally needed to write support code for every possible data format that might be imported into their programs.

To address this problem, the same logic that produced printer drivers has been applied to databases through the use of ODBC drivers. The ODBC drivers allow a program, such as BarTender or a word processor printing address labels, to read data from a variety of data sources, and to do so without having built-in support for every desired data source. Although programs must still have sophisticated internal functions in order to support ODBC, once this capability has been added, the program immediately becomes compatible with any data source for which an ODBC driver is available.

Which Data Sources Are Supported by ODBC, and How Are the Drivers Acquired?

ODBC Drivers exist for all major database management systems, many other data sources like address book systems and Microsoft Excel, and even for text or CSV files.

To encourage their open database standard, Microsoft has written many ODBC drivers. In fact, many of the most popular of the drivers supported by Microsoft are included for free with installation of Microsoft Word, Access, FoxPro, Excel and Project. However, Microsoft is not the only source of ODBC drivers, and some drivers from other companies have demonstrated superior performance. With this in mind, you may want to research the ODBC drivers available for the type of database or data source from which you plan to import data.

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