# 1 Introduction

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1.1 Purpose

The purpose of the Erlang ODBC application is to provide the programmer with an ODBC interface that has a Erlang/OTP touch and feel. So that the programmer may concentrate on solving his/her actual problem instead of struggling with pointers and memory allocation which is not very relevant for Erlang. This user guide will give you some information about technical issues and provide some examples of how to use the Erlang ODBC interface.

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1.2 Prerequisites

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang programming language, concepts of OTP and has a basic understanding of relational databases and SQL.

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1.3 About ODBC

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a Microsoft standard for accessing relational databases that has become widely used. The ODBC standard provides a c-level application programming interface (API) for database access. It uses Structured Query Language (SQL) as its database access language.

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1.4 About the Erlang ODBC application

Provides an Erlang interface to communicate with relational SQL-databases. It is built on top of Microsofts ODBC interface and therefore requires that you have an ODBC driver to the database that you want to connect to. The Erlang ODBC application is designed using the version 3.0 of the ODBC-standard, however using the option {scrollable_cursors, off} for a connection has been known to make it work for at least some 2.X drivers.