In this chapter, you will develop your first ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) application using PowerCOBOL.
NOTE: This exercise requires the NetCOBOL Professional Edition or Enterprise Edition.
In the past, most PC database vendors provided highly proprietary application programming interfaces (API's) as a mechanism for accessing their database management systems (DBMS). These API's tended to vary widely, and were generally designed for the C and C++ programming languages.
Legacy COBOL compiler vendors were slow to provide support for even the most common DBMS on the PC. This support generally came in the form of a limited function COBOL API that was mapped onto the DBMS' API, and in some cases, SQL preprocessors.
As both SQL and database systems have evolved, the need for a more standardized and generic method of accessing them has grown.
ODBC is a defined interface that attempts to provide a highly generic API into any database system that provides ODBC compliant drivers. Just about every database system available on the PC today provides ODBC drivers for a variety of platforms.
ODBC also provides a transparent interface for accessing database servers physically running on other machines on a network. This makes it ideal for developing client/server applications that require database functionality.
In this chapter you will develop an application that will use ODBC technology to access a simple Microsoft Access database system.
