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Standards-Compliant Applications and Drivers

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A standards-compliant application or driver is one that conforms to the Open Group CAE Specification "Data Management: SQL Call-Level Interface (CLI)," and the ISO/IEC 9075-3:1995 (E) Call-Level Interface (SQL/CLI).

ODBC 3.x guarantees the following features:

  • An application written to the Open Group and ISO CLI specifications will work with an ODBC 3.x driver or a standards-compliant driver when it is compiled with the ODBC 3.x header files and linked with ODBC 3.x libraries, and when it gains access to the driver through the ODBC 3.x Driver Manager.

  • A driver written to the Open Group and ISO CLI specifications will work with an ODBC 3.x application or a standards-compliant application when it is compiled with the ODBC 3.x header files and linked with ODBC 3.x libraries, and when the application gains access to the driver through the ODBC 3.x Driver Manager.

Standards-compliant applications and drivers are compiled with the ODBC_STD compile flag.

Standards-compliant applications exhibit the following behavior:

  • If a standards-compliant application calls SQLAllocEnv (which can occur because SQLAllocEnv is a valid function in the Open Group and ISO CLI), the call is mapped to SQLAllocHandleStd at compile time. As a result, at run time, the application calls SQLAllocHandleStd. During the course of processing this call, the Driver Manager sets the SQL_ATTR_ODBC_VERSION environment attribute to SQL_OV_ODBC3. A call to SQLAllocHandleStd is equivalent to a call to SQLAllocHandle with a HandleType of SQL_HANDLE_ENV and a call to SQLSetEnvAttr to set SQL_ATTR_ODBC_VERSION to SQL_OV_ODBC3.

  • If a standards-compliant application calls SQLBindParam (which can occur because SQLBindParam is a valid function in the Open Group and ISO CLI), the ODBC 3.x Driver Manager maps the call to the equivalent call in SQLBindParameter. (See SQLBindParam Mapping in Appendix G: Driver Guidelines for Backward Compatibility.)

  • To align with the ISO CLI, the ODBC 3.x header files contain aliases for information types used in calls to SQLGetInfo. A standards-compliant application can use these aliases instead of the ODBC 3.x information types. For more information, see the next topic, Header Files.

  • A standards-compliant application must verify that all features it supports are supported in the driver it will work with. Setting the SQL_ATTR_CURSOR_SCROLLABLE statement attribute to SQL_SCROLLABLE and setting the SQL_ATTR_CURSOR_SENSITIVITY statement attribute to SQL_INSENSITIVE or SQL_SENSITIVE are capabilities that are available as optional features in the standards but are not included in the ODBC 3.x Core level and therefore might not be supported by all ODBC 3.x drivers. If a standards-compliant application uses these capabilities, it should verify that the driver that it will work with supports them.