What Is ODBC?

Developed by Microsoft, ODBC is a library of standardized data access functions used to connect Windows applications to relational and non-relational databases. It is intended to give programmers a way to access and manipulate data in a variety of dissimilar data sources. ODBC can access a wide variety of file systems because it takes advantage of their common properties and common standards.

With traditional call-level interfaces, you need to learn the API for each data source and application. If you want to extend an application to support an additional data source, or port an application from one data source to another, you must write a complete new access module.

ODBC was designed expressly to provide access to any ODBC-compliant data source. It offers a standard API that can be used to manipulate data in a Microsoft Access database on your PC, or connect from your PC to an Oracle database on a UNIX host. It can even access files that are not databases, such as Excel spreadsheets.

Our two ODBC products, AcuXDBC and Acu4GL for ODBC, are designed to ease the use of ACUCOBOL-GT applications and data in a Microsoft Windows environment. Together, these ODBC interfaces give our customers a broad level of application and data flexibility.

The front-end ODBC product is known as Acu4GL for ODBC. ACUCOBOL-GT uses Acu4GL libraries to access information stored in relational database management systems (RDBMSs). Data dictionaries generated by the compiler guide the libraries in mapping the field names and data types that are passed between COBOL and the database engine. The essence of Acu4GL libraries is that standard COBOL I/O statements are used to access databases. Acu4GL dynamically generates industry-standard SQL from the COBOL I/O statements. As the ACUCOBOL-GT runtime module is executing your COBOL application, Acu4GL is running "behind the scenes" to match up the requirements and rules of both COBOL and the RDBMS to accomplish the task set by your application.

AcuXDBC can be used as a back-end ODBC product. AcuXDBC gives ODBC-enabled Windows applications seamless access to ACUCOBOL-GT Vision files. AcuXDBC Server is an add-on to AcuXDBC that supports remote processing on a Windows NT/2000/2003/2008, UNIX, or Linux server. Whether your Vision data is on a Windows machine, network server, or UNIX server, AcuXDBC can make it accessible to many popular Windows applications, including Excel, Word for Windows, Access, and Microsoft Query.