Note: Background information originally by Tim Goeke ODBC (Open
Database Connectivity) is an abstract API which allows you to
write applications which can interoperate with various RDBMS
servers. ODBC provides a product-neutral interface between
frontend applications and database servers, allowing a user or
developer to write applications which are transportable between
servers from different manufacturers.. The ODBC API matches up
on the backend to an ODBC-compatible data source. This could be
anything from a text file to an Oracle or Postgres RDBMS. The
backend access come from ODBC drivers, or vendor specifc drivers
that allow data access. psqlODBC is such a driver, along with
others that are available, such as the OpenLink ODBC drivers.
Once you write an ODBC application, you should be able to
connect to any back end database, regardless of the vendor, as
long as the database schema is the same. For example. you could
have MS SQL Server and Postgres servers which have exactly the
same data. Using ODBC, yo