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#! rnews 2448 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!uunet!uunet!194.87.0.28!demos!newsfeed.direct.ca!news-peer.gsl.net!jupiter.nic.dtag.de!RRZ.Uni-Koeln.DE!gtnduss1.du.gtn.com!www.punkt.de!not-for-mail From: "Patrick M. Hausen" <hausen@punkt.de> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD and ODBC Connectivity Date: 11 Jun 1997 16:25:11 GMT Organization: WEB Internet Services Lines: 43 Message-ID: <01bc7684$24545b00$f3e94dc2@hugo09.ticsoft.de> References: <5nm7ma$ls@umbc7.umbc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: hugo09.ticsoft.de X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1155 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:42793 Paul Danckaert <pauld@umbc.edu> wrote in <5nm7ma$ls@umbc7.umbc.edu>... > I'm looking for a way of connecting a FreeBSD (or any Unix) machine to an > ODBC database to do standard queries, inserts, etc. What sorts of public > domain or commercial solutions are there? Ahhh, that one again. I'm looking for exactly the same. I've been talking to a friend who develops on NT for a living (poor boy ;-) - he enlightened me about ODBC, which is rather closed despite the name. Possibly you are running into the same misunderstanding as I did, so I'll give everybody some hints on ODBC. The misunderstanding is: ODBC is _not_ a network or IPC interface. It's an API. Thus, you can program ODBC calls in a supported programming language on a supported OS with the database-vendor-supplied library. The point is, there simply is no ODBC interface to the outside. If you want to write an application using, say, Informix, with the client running on a Macintosh, then you need to get a Macintosh ODBC library from Informix. If they don't provide one - bad luck. The communication of the library (so called "ODBC driver") and the database server ist completely proprietary. A possible solution, we made up, is as follows: If your DB server OS is (e.g.) NT, then write an NT "service" (that's a daemon for the M$ impaired), that acts as an ODBC client to whatever database server is running on the NT machine. This service could provide a network interface to programs on arbitrary machines. Of course, that's not an easy task, because not only do you have to write the server, but you are in charge of designing the network protocol, too (runnig on top of TCP, of course). I've not yet seen a product implementing this. Patrick