20022013 Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. Introduction Ingela Anderton 2002-09-17 A introduction.xml
Purpose

The purpose of the Erlang ODBC application is to provide the programmer with an ODBC interface that has a Erlang/OTP touch and feel. So that the programmer may concentrate on solving his/her actual problem instead of struggling with pointers and memory allocation which is not very relevant for Erlang. This user guide will give you some information about technical issues and provide some examples of how to use the Erlang ODBC interface.

Prerequisites

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang programming language, concepts of OTP and has a basic understanding of relational databases and SQL.

About ODBC

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a Microsoft standard for accessing relational databases that has become widely used. The ODBC standard provides a c-level application programming interface (API) for database access. It uses Structured Query Language (SQL) as its database access language.

About the Erlang ODBC application

Provides an Erlang interface to communicate with relational SQL-databases. It is built on top of Microsofts ODBC interface and therefore requires that you have an ODBC driver to the database that you want to connect to. The Erlang ODBC application is designed using the version 3.0 of the ODBC-standard, however using the option {scrollable_cursors, off} for a connection has been known to make it work for at least some 2.X drivers.