ODBCSDK is a free drop-in replacement shared-library (DLL) that enables your Mac and PC app to use ODBC drivers installed on a Windows server in place of client-side ODBC control panels, driver managers, drivers and supporting libraries.

Since there are less than a dozen ODBC drivers available on all non-Windows platforms combined, it makes little sense to endure the significant deployment costs, technical support and customer training issues associated with non-Windows ODBC control panels. ODBCSDK eliminates these issues and also enables Windows clients to benefit from centralized administration.

Instead of linking your application to an ODBC Driver Manager, you will link to our compatible ODBCSDK shared library (or plug-in) and either specify the network-address of the Customer's Window Server in the ODBC connection string, or supply an /etc/odbcrouter.conf file or a simple "callback routine" that returns the name of the Customer's Windows Server. (On GUI platforms like Mac OS, OS X and Windows, you may even specify "DSN-less" strings to request that ODBCSDK prompt the user with its own "network database chooser".) This eliminates the need for your users to interact with an ODBC control panel and complex driver configuration on each machine in their network, thus reducing your technical support.

ODBCSDK implements the entire ODBC API with the exception of driver-management calls (which are not needed since the database drivers reside on a centrally managed Windows server), SQLExtendedFetch/SetPos (use a cursor library instead) or the optional 3.X and 4.X API extensions (unecessary, see docs).

About "old way" ODBC development