ODBC and
JDBC are the most popular SQL standards adopted by developers to access data and run queries. Using these standards allows applications to send SQL statements to different data sources without having to code multiple times. While JDBC was written for the Java environment, ODBC was designed to be language-agnostic. That's one of the major reasons, you see a lot more applications support ODBC than JDBC.
Developers often get into a dilemma when an application has been designed to consume ODBC drivers, whereas the database supports only JDBC. Recreating an ODBC layer at the DB level or a JDBC support at the application may not be in your control or even cost-effective to build and maintain in the long run. In such cases, we recommend that enterprises deploy an ODBC-JDBC bridge (a.k.a an ODBC wrapper) to make the JDBC compliant database look like an ODBC data source.
OpenAccess SDK is our SQL engine that makes it very easy to build an ODBC wrapper on top of any API. With almost 95% of the coding already taken care of, wrapping a JDBC driver (or for that matter any API) with an ODBC layer can be done in days if not hours. And the best part of OpenAccess is that queries could be passed through as long as the underlying API can handle a particular query. In other cases, OpenAccess can deconstruct the query and reconstruct the results to support additional ODBC features. In this tutorial, we have wrapped a Snowflake JDBC driver with ODBC and accessed it from OBIEE. OpenAccess can be your ODBC-REST bridge, ODBC-SOAP bridge or an ODBC-ODBC wrapper (when the existing ODBC driver is not robust enough) based on your enterprises need.
In the recent past, we have seen several customers having trouble to connect their Snowflake JDBC and ODBC drivers with OBIEE, Informatica, SAS and other popular applications. This is due to the DataDirect Driver Manager embedded by these applications that expect a supported ODBC driver. In this case, wrapping their JDBC or ODBC drivers with DataDirect's OpenAccess driver will make them compliant with these applications once again. Please follow the steps below to use your ODBC wrapped Snowflake JDBC (or ODBC) driver along with OBIEE:
- Now you are all set up to use the snowflake driver with your favorite BI and ETL tools like OBIEEE, Informatica, SAS etc.,
- For example in OBIEEE, you should now be able to connect to Snowflake as shown below

With Progress OpenAccess SDK, you can now connect to your favorite data source using an ODBC interface via JDBC or using JDBC interface via ODBC driver. In addition to that, you can also choose to add your own customizations such as data masking etc., when you use OpenAccess SDK. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or issues, we will be happy to assist you.