The point that stands out to me about the usefulness of ODBC is not
as a means to build an ACS that can use any lowest-common-denominator
DB, but the usefulness
of being able to open connections to other databases simultaneously.
Although I haven't had to do this lately (i.e., in the last two years that
I was working for aD), it seems like an extremely useful thing to be able
to call out to "auxiliary" databases via ODBC. In the case that you had
some specific data, like credit card transactions, living in some external
system DB like Microsoft SQL Server. I haven't been following the ODBC
support for AOLserver
very carefully, so this is actually the first I heard of the DB2 or nsodbc
module.
When I worked on MetaHTML (www.metahtml.com) (an early ACS-like
application scripting environment using our own homegrown HTML
syntax scripting language, sort of like ColdFusion), I wrote the ODBC
glue and generic SQL API for it. We used the ODBC drivers
from OpenLink (www.openlinksw.com) which at the time were
the only drivers available for Unix. They seemed like a very
reasonable company, and had good technical support.
