14 DAY TRIAL // In light of the upcoming Snow Leopard release, Apple has issued an “ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X,” a software package that enables database administration of ODBC-compliant data sources.
Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) provides a standard software API method for using database management systems (DBMS). The makers of ODBC set a goal to make it independent of programming languages, database systems, and operating systems.
On the Support section of its website, Apple describes the ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X as follows:
About ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X
Enables database administration of ODBC-compliant data sources.
Features include connection pooling, trace log creation, and ODBC driver management, among other administration features.
The ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X version 1.0 was posted on August 27, 2009 and is roughly 5MB in size. The tool cannot be installed on Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.6, thus cannot be used at the moment. Requiring Snow Leopard, the ODBC Administrator Tool for Mac OS X is supported only in English.
ODBC uses the various Call Level Interface (CLI) specifications from the SQL Access Group, X/Open (now part of The Open Group), and the ISO/IEC, according to Wikipedia. Microsoft, in partnership with Simba Technologies, created ODBC by adapting the SQL Access Group CLI. It released ODBC 1.0 in September 1992 and, after ODBC 2.0, Microsoft decided to align ODBC 3.0 with the CLI specification making its way through X/Open and ISO, the story goes.
It wasn’t until 1995 that SQL/CLI became part of the international SQL standard, the text reveals. ODBC implementations run on many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Unix, Linux, OS/2, OS/400, IBM i5/OS, and, just as important, on Mac OS X. There are hundreds of ODBC drivers out there, according to the online encyclopedia.
