What Does the ODBC 4.0 Announcement Mean?

Progress DataDirect will host the first open summit to start collecting feedback on ODBC 4.0 following the announcement.

The Microsoft Data Group’s recent blog on the new release of ODBC for modern data stores effectively announces ODBC 4.0, the first significant update in over 15 years. We are very excited about this and will share what this means for you.

What Is Our Position on ODBC 4.0?

Over the past year we’ve been working with the Microsoft Data Group on the ODBC 4.0 specification.

The Progress DataDirect engineering team is proud to contribute expertise to advancing open data standards. The co-founder of the ODBC specification, John Goodson, established the culture of democratizing data at Progress DataDirect. In that spirit, we also serve on the JDBC expert group and were the first member to join the OData technical committee.

This is a very important update to better leverage the natural representation of data across the proliferation of fit-for-purpose databases and cloud data sources. To illustrate, that data may be accessed directly from document stores, object oriented query languages or entities exposed with web services APIs.

When Will this Benefit You?

The announcement was made on June 7, but work has been underway that we cannot share specifically under NDA. There are several features being developed in our suite of ODBC drivers today that will be added to the ODBC 4.0 specification. You can take advantage of these cutting edge features today, with the confidence that open standards bring to application development.

Once formalized, we will then look into releasing the updates to our suite of commercial ODBC connectors across relational, big data, NoSQL and cloud. We'll also support open source communities updating their drivers wherever we can help.

After the connectivity is in place, application vendors that support ODBC would pick up the specification changes in a future release.

In summary, you will start to benefit from immediate changes to our drivers as we begin to implement 4.0 functionality, but we’re many months away from seeing the full benefit of ODBC 4.0.

How to Provide Feedback on the Spec?

We take a collaborative approach that is different from many other vendors talking about ODBC 4.0. To us, the most important aspect of serving on standards committees is to actually provide valuable feedback and solicit input from real organizations adopting those very same standards.

We recommend you engage the Microsoft Data Group directly on the blog post and we fully endorse Mike Pizzo (Principal Architect, Microsoft Data Group) as someone who shares our operating principles and culture around standards.

We’re also excited to have Mike present updates on ODBC and OData specifications at our annual partner summit in Silicon Valley following the ODBC 4.0 announcement.

By working directly with the organizations that develop ODBC compliant applications, we can accelerate adoption of the new specifications to benefit everyone. We invited 350 OEM partners that distribute our technology and trust our community of experts for thought leadership. This is an influential group of tech companies that drive industry innovation, including seven of the top nine leaders in the Gartner BI Magic Quadrant.

Check back on our blog for further updates to ODBC 4.0 and follow our contributions on odata.org where we’re tracking the adoption of OData in parallel.

Looking for Input on Your ODBC Roadmap?

Contact our experts directly for a vendor neutral perspective:

Mark Biamonte, Senior Architect (17 years with DataDirect)

Brody Messmer, Product Architect (13 years with DataDirect)