ODBC takes an Arrow to the knee

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 that would be implemented by database-specific drivers. This allowed a developer to write their application and potentially easily migrate it to another database by simply specifying a different driver. By 1997, the JDBC API was developed to provide a common Java API for programs to manage multiple drivers and connect either by bridging to an ODBC connection or by utilizing other types of connections (such as native vendor libraries or pure Java connections), all of which have different pros and cons. Almost 30 years later, these technologies are still the de facto standard way of communicating with SQL databases.

In the intervening time, computing – and data in particular –...