What's so bad about ODBC

On May 10, 3:21 pm, DA Morgan <damor..._at_psoug.org> wrote:

>
> It is far better to connect to Oracle using the native connectivity.
> Get as far away from ODBC as you can.
>
> It may not solve your problem but it will still be a good idea.

What exactly might be a problem with ODBC? I ask because a customer appears to be moving towards sucking out a lot of stuff into MS analytics cubes and such. I think it's using ODBC, but not sure how to tell. This is in the listener.log (all that's left after removing site-specific identifiers):

CID=(PROGRAM=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn \sqlservr.exe)

At one point, I had shown the customer how to get this stuff (or something like it) going with instant client as the driver, but I don't know what is happening now (a vendor has recently done an install of a beta product, I'm not involved on that end). I don't know how different this is than a typical Crystal suck or whatever, it does appear to be hitting the db with some frequency at semi-random times. Haven't had a chance to see exactly what it is doing yet, assume it is just grabbing rows from a few key tables.

So I'm interested in what might be wrong with ODBC from the server point of view. If it blows on the other end, that doesn't bother me so much. They're talking about maybe turning this into a full-blown DSS, which would be fine by me, since that would mean plenty of work on the OLTP side (translation: Oracle db upgrade and 3rd party app upgrade with perhaps a de-customization, haha), and less worry about DSS queries from the clueless on the production system. And maybe I'd learn something about the dark side, too.

jg

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