ODBC from Perl

So we’ve established that the ODBC standard is a rather good thing, but how can you use it?

To use ODBC from Perl, there are only two practical options: the Win32::ODBC module and the DBI with the DBD::ODBC module. We’ll describe DBD::ODBC first and then take a deeper look at Win32::ODBC.

DBD::ODBC

The DBD::ODBC module was written by Tim Bunce and Jeff Urlwin, based on original code by Thomas K. Wenrich. It’s a Perl extension written in C and is not tied to Microsoft Win32 platforms. That makes it a good option for directly using ODBC on Unix, VMS, and other non-Windows systems.

Being a DBI driver, the main goal of the DBD::ODBC module is to implement the functionality required by the DBI, not simply to give access to ODBC from Perl.

The DBD::ODBC driver is described in more detail in Appendix B.