> Worse, it's a stab at defining a 4.0 version of ODBC, and there's not
> a been change of any substance in the repo since May 2018.  The part
> you linked to?  Not in 3 years.
>
> It's also useful to note that Microsoft has had at least 3 different
> efforts in this niche.  Contrary to my previous memory, I'm now pretty
> sure the intense OLTP work I did with non-mainframe DB2 UDB was
> through OLE DB and COM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLE_DB), which
> per Wikipedia they were more interested in in the mid-1990s than ODBC.
> And were planning on dropping support of this year for SQL Server,
> but changed their mind in 2017.
>
> Since the 1990s, at the same conceptual level, ADO.NET data providers
> are their new hotness, a part of their CLR (Common Language Runtime,
> i.e. what C# runs on top of).
>
> All that said, the fate of ODBC is out of their hands, with two
> independent but reported to be compatible ODBC Driver Managers and at
> least 3 companies providing ODBC drivers for costs that are modest
> enough for companies.  But that's unacceptable *to base* our database
> API efforts on.  Better to use JDBC to support "second class"
> databases beyond PostgreSQL, SQLite, and should their be a 3rd?
>
> I'll bring up first and second class support for databases and what
> should be in which in a future posting if no one runs with it now.

Thanks for investigating all this Harold! Indeed, every aspect of the
way they are stewarding the standard seems like a bad bet for us. So no
hard feelings from me if ODBC is put to rest :)