Question

I need to develop some kind of application and use DB in it.

Let’s say i want to develop it over Windows currently, however, in a couple months i may have to migrate it to Linux.

I started reading a little bit about it, but couldn’t get to point i needed.

Is there or isn’t a generic/protable/standart api for using DB ?

I read there is ODBC,JDBC, iOBDC,unixODBC ? why all of these exist ?

Can someone help clearing and setting my head straight regarding the issue ?

Edit – I’m using C++ – so please advise to that direction, even though i’ll appreciate inter-language/inter-platform recommendations

Answer 1

There’s a bunch of C++ “wrapper” libraries for generic DB access, here’s couple of top of my head:

• SOCI – modern C++ syntax, active development, plays nice with boost, supports multiple backends
• OTL – header-only (templates), very light-weight

Both of these grew out of Oracle-specific work, but support at least several other databases now.
Of course you can’t really hide vendor differences, but that is general law of leaky abstractions.