Re: ODBC FROM iSeries - huh?

["John Taylor" <jtaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Joe Pluta

> Honestly, John, I'm just getting my arms around the whole ODBC concept.

Then you understand it better than you think, because you seem to understand
JDBC very well, and JDBC is based upon ODBC's design.

>   It seems to me that on a portability scale,
> Java > SQL > RPG.  RPG requires a compiler, while SQL only requires a
driver
> for each DBMS.  Java beats them all because it only requires a single JVM
> per platform (and the chances are that the JVM is available, whereas the
> ODBC drivers are pretty much at the whim of the DBMS provider or some
third
> party).


Yup. Practically speaking though, it's rarely an issue because ODBC drivers
are client side middlewhere, and client OS' such as Win/32 and *nix are well
represented by the DBMS providers. Those who wish to use OS/400 as a client
to an MS-Access database are SOL, but how big can that demand really be?

>
> Back to Walden's original counterpoint, unlike Java, ODBC is seemingly
*NOT*
> very well supported on OS/400.  In my admittedly cursory investigation,
I've
> found very few native ODBC drivers for OS/400.  So it's hard to access
> non-DB2 data from an iSeries, except through type 3 JDBC drivers.  My
> original statement that the iSeries speaks ODBC is misleading or
incorrect.
> Unless you include type 3 JDBC, the iSeries speaks very little ODBC.
>
> I think that sort of sums up the situation, don't you?

Yes on the point that ODBC is not well supported (if at all) on OS/400. But
you don't necessarily need an ODBC driver to access a different  database.
ODBC is simply an API... an implementation of the ANSI/ISO SQL Call Level
Interface. In theory (I haven't tried) one should be able to access any DB
server that implements the SQL CLI using OS/400 as a client.

Where the confusion really begins, is when people start talking about
MS-Access, and it's related brethren. These are desktop databases, not
database management systems. The difference is that the simple database does
not provide an SQL engine itself. Instead, the SQL engine is implemented
within the driver itself. Therefore, you can't use CLI on OS/400 to talk to
an MS-Access database, because there's nothing on the other end to hear you.

Regards,

John Taylor