The topic of this talk is interoperability and how interoperability can be achieved with ODBC. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity and is a standard interface to access databases under Microsoft Windows.
As we will see, interoperability is nothing you get for free. Even if you decide to use ODBC, you will not automatically get interoperability although the term ODBC might suggest it.
ODBC shall provide a uniform interface for database client applications to log on to different databases (wherefore it is called OPEN database connectivity). But connecting to a database is only part of the job. We will see that there remain some hindrances on the way to interoperable database client applications.