ODBC, an acronym for Open Database Connectivity. TDBC provides an ODBC driver, whch, as of Tcl version 8.6, is part of the core Tcl distribution.
See Also
- Excel
- Database Interface
- Interacting with databases
Documentation
- Open Database Connectivity Without Compromise! ,Kingsley Idehen ,1993
- ODBC Standard
- ODBC: a Technical Overview ,Ben Weijers ,2001-01-09
Utilities
- Odbcisql, by TP
- A nice companion to TclODBC is [L1 ]. Odbcisql is a Tk-based SQL processor for ODBC databases.
- MOODBC
- an ODBC-like extension that allows you to connect to Postgres, Sybase, MS SQL Server, and mSQL databases
Tcl Interfaces
- TDBC
- an ODBC driver for TDBC is included with Tcl since version 8.6
- SQL Relay
- Tclodbc
- Prior to TDBC, the most popular ODBC interface
- moodss
- has an odbcquery module
- odbcisql
- Windowing SQL processor for ODBC connected databases.
- extension to SOLID database server (defunct)
- odbctcl
- an old Tcl interface to ODBC, superseded by TDBC
- pgsql (defunct)
- Enhanced interface library to Postgresql 6.0 backend
- SnODBC
- An extension providing access to ODBC 3.0 API in tclodbc-like manner
- TclSQL
- Another Windows-only C++-based SQL 3.0 ODBC extension for reading,inserting,updating, and deleting records from a database. The source code and nifty starkit on how to use tktable with SQL Server are included at the sourceforge project website. The starkit show's a working example of how to update a SQL table using the tktable widget.
- HellerTclODBC
- a rewrite of Tclodbc in plain C.
- COMPANY: Belgian Graphic Interface
- at one point, provided BgiTclodbc a package of their own called Tclodbc which was unrelated Tclodbc or the other ODBC packages.
- Thomas tclodbc
- in 1999, Vince Thomas, v p t h o m a at u s dot i b m dot c o m, ported a portion of tclodbc to use the CLI interface to DB2. He stopped work on it once he got things to work for himself.
Applications
- Helga (defunct)
- Reduce code length and complexity for applications mixing CGI HTML, ODBC, and Tcl
Description
ODBC is a database API. It uses SQL for the actual queries. It is an implementation of the standard SQL/CLI API. [Note: ODBC itself does not contain any networking functions, that is a common misunderstanding. Individual database drivers often do, though.]
The best known ODBC implementation is the one by Microsoft that comes with Windows, but MacOS X also comes with its own implementation since version 10.2 and there are several implementations on other Unixes and Linux.
ODBC implementations consist of a middleware layer with which applications link and a driver layer that is implemented by individual database drivers. In addition the middleware layer implements a configuration repository (often with a GUI) where the drivers are configured and where so-called "data sources" can be defined.
A data source is a database access definition. Such a data source commonly contains the hostname, database instance name and sometimes user and password. While such database access parameters can be used by the applications directly, it is usually easier to setup a data source and have the application only specify the data source name (DSN).