IN THE MIDDLE

ODBC And Data Access On The Internet

by Bruce Robertson

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is no longer a technology that everyone talks about but no one uses. ODBC is now available from multiple vendors, supported by applications and in use in a variety of production situations. Yes, ODBC has finally arrived--perhaps just in time to be eclipsed by Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) interfaces to databases!

ODBC drivers are optimized, generating performance that isn't very different from native database Application Programming Interface (API) connections. Intersolv recently published an independent study showing that the performance differences were negligible. Test suites are available from a variety of vendors including Visigenic and SYWARE.

ODBC has gone cross platform. Beyond Windows, Visigenic and Intersolv (Q+E) offer support for OS/2, Macintosh and Unix platforms. The ODBC marketplace is simplifying. Visigenic has the license from Microsoft to provide ODBC SDKs on non-Windows platforms. Moreover, besides a few RDBMS vendors, Visigenic and Intersolv (Q+E) now make the most common, complete client driver packs for ODBC. Fewer vendors and second- and third-generation products make for much more stable implementations. Moreover, since collections of drivers from major vendors often offer a high level of feature conformance across a variety of RDBMS backends, programming applications for portability using ODBC is realistically possible. ODBC has delivered on the promise with products. So, what's new?

ODBC on the Internet Another trend is ODBC vendors hyping the fact that they can work over the Internet. This isn't much more than hype. After all, any database networking middleware that supports an ODBC API and that can communicate over TCP/IP would qualify for the "it works on the Internet" overstatement award.

The real question is what unique and interesting features such as Internet-oriented ODBC products might have. DataRamp from Working Set provides secure ODBC connections that use RSA (from RSA Data Security) public key encryption to hide all data from prying eyes. Often, database middleware even leaves the login authentication passwords out in the clear on the wire. This won't fly on the Internet.

ODBC Access or Web Forms? Using forms on the Internet to get data ain't all it's cracked up to be, even with an increasing variety of products filling the Web server to RDBMS void. The forms way, however, does all the work on the back end. Moreover, you can't use anything but a Web browser to interact with the data in the underlying RDBMS. Web forms are fine for simple forms work, but they aren't enough for serious database interaction.

Web forms do have a significant advantage: Deploying an application requires no client installation at all--no middleware, no application code, just the Web browser. DataRamp does require loading ODBC drivers on the client, along with ODBC-compatible applications.

Client/server application developers looking to the Internet should keep this issue in mind. There's a trade-off between functionality and deployability. For simplistic applications, forms may be enough. For more serious applications, forms won't cut it, and ODBC over the Internet might, indeed, be the best approach.

Makes you wonder, though. Why couldn't there be some level of database middleware snuggled right into the http protocol and the Web browser? Why not have the Web browser include a basic, yet standardized, database interaction model that's better than forms?

As Web interfaces become the terminal interface of the next century, it might be well to consider a more serious marriage of database access and the Internet. In addition to the ODBC API, we'd need a full-fledged middleware protocol over TCP/IP. Will this be the area in which the X/Open Remote Database Access (RDA) standard finally reaches critical mass? Maybe we need free ODBC client middleware instead. Microsoft and Netscape, are you listening?

Bruce Robertson can be reached at brobertson@nwc.com.

October 15, 1995