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dBASE IV’s ODBC-compliance

dBASE IV’s ODBC-compliance

Question:
Is dBASE IV an ODBC-compliant database?

Answer:
ODBC compliance is (or was) a specific set of functionality expected of a back end being mediated by an ODBC driver program that interacted with an ODBC Driver Manager.

For each level of ODBC compliance, more or fewer data types and other metadata gathering were supported, as I recall.

dBASE IV was a file system product, even though you could switch it into SQL mode. I think it ran SCAN under the covers 🙂 .

Did they ever introduce the SQL engine into the product? Were system tables, security, recovery, and rollback ever added? I don’t remember, but I don’t think you can call it a server database.

So while I bet there are ODBC drivers that let you read data in dBASE IV files, in the absence of a data catalog, system tables, security, rollback, and recovery, I would have to say that dBASE IV is a file system, not a database, and it probably conforms to the lowest level of ODBC compliance and makes its data available as a flat file to ODBC.

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