Programming the Perl DBI

ODBC—Embraced and Extended

In the early 1990s, a consortium of vendors formed the SQL Access Group to support SQL interoperability across disparate systems. In October 1992 and October 1993, a major part of that work was published as a draft standard entitled "Call Level Interface,” or CLI, which is another name for an Application Programing Interface, or API. However, the SQL Access Group CLI standard never really took off. At least, not in that form.

Microsoft needed to implement a similar concept, to avoid having to release multiple versions of any product that needed to talk to multiple databases. They saw the SQL Access Group CLI standard and ``embraced and extended'' it, radically. The result was the Open Database Connectivity interface, which rapidly became a de facto standard. In fairness, Microsoft turned an incomplete paper standard into a fully featured practical reality.