> Foxperts,
>
> I found this site while surfing on the net to use ODBC instead of OLEDB and on the link below shows that there are three major reasons that they were not using OLEDB:
>
> http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/961210.htm?voteresult=5
>
> Reason not to use OLEDB:
> OLEDB does not support connection caching.
> OLEDB is slower then ODBC.
> OLEDB requires more code.
>
> but some says OLEDB is much faster than ODBC....
>
>
> I'm wondering what would be your comment....
>
>
> Regards
>
> Zed


HI,

Just some facts on the two.

OLEDB is the successor to ODBC, a set of software components that allow a "front end" such as GUI based on VB, C++, Access or whatever to connect with a back end such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, mySQL etal. In many cases the OLEDB components offer much better performance than the older ODBC.

OLEDB is a different type of data provider that came about with MS's Universal Data Access in 1996 and does not require that you set up a DSN. It is commonly used when building VB apps and is closely tied to ADO. It works with COM, and DCOM.

Using ODBC is generally slower than OLEDB. When you use ODBC you actually accessing ODBC via a special OLEDB Provider for ODBC Drivers.

There are two problems with ODBC. The first is that ODBC is a C API and so is not COM accessible. The second problem is that ODBC is designed solely as an interface to relational databases. ODBC API's are designed specifically for SQL to an RDBMS. Many of the ODBC method names even contain the word SQL. Although this is certainly no problem if you are only interested in accessing relational databases, it is awkward if you want to access non-relational databases that don't understand SQL. Microsoft wanted to remove this inherent limitation, and as part of something it called Universal Data Access (UDA) MS wanted a more generic way of accessing any type of data from any type of data source. It should be possible to query an Excel spreadsheet in the same way you can query a database table. It should further be possible to join an Excel spreadsheet with a relational database table. Thus, OLE-DB became the preferred back-interface.

Pete from the Great White North. (Only in Canada, ay.) Over and Out ...