ODBC takes an Arrow to the knee
Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standardized Application Programming Interface (API) for accessing databases originally designed and built in the early 1990s. The development of ODBC intended to enable applications to be independent of their underlying database by having a standardized API to use that would be implemented by database-specific drivers. This allowed a developer to write their application and potentially easily migrate to a different database by simply specifying a different driver. In 1997, the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API was developed to provide a common API for Java programs to manage multiple drivers and connect either by bridging to an ODBC connection or by other types of connections, which all have different pros and cons. Almost 30 years later, these technologies are still the de facto standard way to communicate with Structured Query Language (SQL) databases.
That all being said, computing, and data in particular...