About database drivers

ColdFusion uses ODBC, OLE DB, and Native database drivers to communicate with a variety of popular database programs. Not all ColdFusion Server editions support all database drivers. ColdFusion Professional Edition is limited to ODBC on Linux and to ODBC and OLE DB on Win32. For a table of supported database drivers, see the book Advanced ColdFusion Server Administration.

ODBC drivers

Available on any platform, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) accesses SQL data in a manner that is independent of platform. Any valid ODBC data source installed on your system is available automatically to your ColdFusion applications. You have to register it as a ColdFusion data source using the Create ODBC Data Sources page. As you register the data source, you can configure it with ColdFusion-specific options, such as the ability to specify SQL operations to restrict the current data source.

 

Data source configuration information is stored in the odbc.ini file on UNIX and in the registry on Win32 platforms. The main role of the odbc.ini file is to map a data source name (DSN) to an ODBC driver.

 

For detailed information about specific options for your ODBC driver, see the documentation that accompanies your database program or the ODBC driver documentation. If you run ColdFusion on UNIX, see the Merant documentation, which is distributed with ColdFusion as an Acrobat file. By default, this information installs in <installdir>/coldfusion/odbc/doc/odbcref.pdf.

OLE DB drivers

OLE DB, available only in the Windows NT and Windows 2000 platform, is a Microsoft specification for a set of interfaces designed to access data regardless of the data type. OLE DB accesses SQL and non-SQL data in an OLE Component Object Model (COM) environment.

 

You can access a range of data sources using Microsoft OLE DB:

 

To use OLE DB, you have to install OLE DB provider software from a third-party vendor. The software handles data processing requests from ColdFusion. See the book Advanced ColdFusion Server Administration for more information about providers and installing provider software.

Native drivers

The Enterprise Edition of ColdFusion Server uses native drivers on Windows NT and UNIX platforms and supports DB2, Informix, Sybase System 11, Sybase Adaptive Server 11.5, and Oracle 7.3, 8.0, and 8i databases through native database drivers in both Windows NT and UNIX platforms.

 

Native drivers usually offer better performance than ODBC drivers and provide some stored procedure functionality. To use ColdFusion native drivers, you have to install and configure database client software. See the book Advanced ColdFusion Server Administration for more information about database client software installation.

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