Programming Languages and the Importance of ODBC

A few weeks back a colleague and I were driving through Seattle, and we began to debate the reach of ODBC as a key data standard.  His perspective was that ODBC was really a C/C++ technology, and that as people have largely moved to other programming languages, the importance of ODBC has declined as well.  Well, I didn’t buy that argument but needed to do some research before I could refute him.  As I mainly tinker with iOS development these days, my awareness of what is happening in the programming world at large is well out-of-date.

Well, it didn’t take long to dig up some examples:

• ODBC for PHP.  Basically, as long as you have an ODBC driver, PHP will support it just lovely.  Here is the manual on how to configure it:  http://us2.php.net/manual/en/book.uodbc.php
• ODBC for Erlang.  Well, that is pretty cool.  Trying to write a highly parallelized application that deals with a lot of data?  Can’t get much better of a combo than this!   Here’s the manual pages that show how to set this up too:  http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/odbc.html
• ODBC for Python.  Okay, I think I’m starting to prove my point.  Here’s the link to setting this up: https://wiki.python.org/moin/ODBC
• ODBC for Perl.  Well, since this one is listed on our site, this was a no brainer.  http://www.datadirect.com/resources/resource-library/odbc-developer-center/odbc-tutorials/using-datadirect-odbc-drivers-with-perl
• ODBC for Ruby.  Alright, I’m going to stop now.  Here is how to set this up:  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/835868/simple-remote-odbc-database-connection-with-ruby

What is interesting is that most of the examples here refer to relational databases.  But in case you didn’t already know, what Progress DataDirect also does really well is make any cloud application and Big Data, NoSQL database look and feel just like a relational database.  So let’s say you want to do things like:

• Connect PHP to Salesforce
• Connect Erlang to MongoDB
• Connect Python to Apache Hive
• Connect Perl to Marketo
• Connect Ruby to Microsoft Dynamics
• Etc...

You can download Progress DataDirect for ODBC to make each of these data sources feel as if it were a SQL Server or MySQL database.  Start here if you’re interested: http://www.datadirect.com/products/datadirect-connect/odbc-drivers

And to my colleague, you owe me a burger and beer.  I’ll see you in Austin!