RE: news400 goes negative on IBM? -- MIDRANGE-L

I don't understand your question.  Are you saying that you can write an
Oracle application that can access all the functions of SQL Server?
Because that's simply not true.  What is allowed is whatever subset of
ODBC that Oracle supports, based on whatever ODBC access SQL Server
allows.

Here's how it works: ODBC clients are not universal.  Each vendor must
provide all the ODBC drivers for its database, one for each platform
that they support.  They may also supply a Type 4 JDBC driver, which can
take the place of an ODBC driver and provide support for any
Java-enabled platform.  So it's up to the database vendor, not the
operating system vendor, to ensure that a given database is accessed by
a given platform.

Next, each database vendor then decides which parts of ODBC drivers its
database engine can support.  Again, this has nothing to do with the
operating system, it's the database engine.

DB2 is perhaps one of the most open databases: you can access it from
just about anywhere, including both ODBC and DRDA access.  They have
drivers for just about any platform you can imagine.

Unfortunately, most database vendors are not as open as IBM: they do not
supply native ODBC clients for OS/400, so that makes it difficult for
OS/400 to access other databases.  However, more and more vendors are
supplying Type 4 JDBC drivers, which allow direct access to their
database engine from any Java-enabled platform.  Thus, rather than
having to write a specific ODBC driver for every platform, they can just
supply the JDBC driver.  Then, as demand warrants, they can write
specific ODBC drivers for a given platform.

Since nobody supplies ODBC drivers for OS/400, it would be sort of
stupid for IBM to write ODBC access into RPG or indeed any of its
languages.  Instead, it has DRDA support which is more like the Type 4
JDBC support; it will talk to any DRDA-capable database.  I'm not that
familiar, though, with DRDA so I may not be entirely correct in this.

But I DO know that IBM supports Java, and JDBC, so that any database
vendor that supplies a Type 4 JDBC Driver will automatically be
supported by OS/400.  You can't say that for Microsoft, since they no
longer support Java.  Database vendors will have to continue to make
special Microsoft-specific ODBC drivers if they wish to enable Microsoft
connections.  But as long as they have a Type 4 JDBC Driver, anybody in
the Java world (including OS/400) will be able to access them.

Joe


> From: Carel Teijgeler
> 
> I was not talking RPG here. I was talking SQL in any flavour: SQL/400,
> rmbedded SQL (in any HLL language), SQL-CLI (in any HLL language) . I
> won't buy it can only be done with a JDBC connection (also an SQL
> variant).
> 
> Or should I install DB/2 for xxx (where xxx is the other platform) to
get
> one (tiny) function operational?