Driver Manager
The ODBC Driver Manager (DM) provides some very important features to the application. Here are some highlights;
- dynamic binding to driver
- ODBC version mapping (data and calls)
- UNICODE/ASCII translation
- cursor emulation
- ODBC rule enforcement (state transition violations etc)
The vast majority of applications will use the DM. A C/C++ application uses the DM by linking to it (the DM is a library) at build time.
No Driver Manager
In some cases the DM is not important - or is even ‘in the way’. This may be the case when;
- an application wishs to take advanatge of the code portability ODBC offers but wishs to build the code to work with just one database product
- there is a need to reduce the dependencies/complexities of the application - perhaps for performance …