About
The ODBC Application Programming Interface (API) defines the functions your application can call in the ODBC driver manager and the arguments they take.
The reference for the ODBC API is The Microsoft ODBC 3.0 Programmers Reference Volume 1 and 2 (ISBN 1-57231-516-4) although you may have some trouble finding this now.
The ODBC API is a library of ODBC functions that let ODBC-enabled applications connect to any database for which an ODBC driver is available, execute SQL statements, and retrieve results.
The ODBC API is strongly oriented toward C/C++ programmers. It uses a C interface
Most recently, Microsoft has introduced UDA (Universal Data Access) as an umbrella term that covers:
- ADO,
- RDS,
- and ODBC.
Each ODBC library defines and exposes (largely) the same set of functions.