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akhila75

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Should ODBC drivers be written?

Hi,
   I have a client server application[server is written in c and client is
   written using MFC].

   Server maintains the database in flat files. Client can request the
   following operations from the server.
   a. add a record,
   b. modify a record,
   c. query,
   d. list the records....

   Now there is a request to make the application ODBC compliant.
   As i have understood, it means the server should be able to talk to
   other SQL databases
   
   So how should i implement it?
   Should i write ODBC drivers for the present database,
   and make server use ODBC calls?
   If this is the right approach, what books/urls should i refer?

   Is there any other solution?
   i.e is there any other way of making this application ODBC compliant?

   Thanking you,
Akhila
 
Avatar of david_levine
david_levine

Well, from the way I read your posting, the server accesses the database(s) and not the client. Is that correct?

There are ODBC drivers today for most databases and even for pure text files. You could ODBC enable your app today to access the flat files you already have on the server.

Not sure what else your server app is doing, so it's hard to make recommendations, but it should be fairly trival.

Install the appropraite ODBC driver on the server and create a DSN (connection) to it via the ODBC Control Panel. In your server app, you'd connect to the ODBC control at startup and disconnect on exit (which is probably never other then a shutdown). And then you'd replace your reads/writes to the flat files with ODBC SQL calls.

You'd probably want to convert to a database at some point, even an Access one. As your flat files get bigger, performance will start to suffer substantially. And if your Access table definitions mimic your flat file, the only change would be to modify the DSN to point to your Access "database" instead of the flat files. No code changes should be required.

David
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Avatar of Ron Warshawsky
Ron Warshawsky

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