OLE DB is dead, long live ODBC

Microsoft has announced that OLE DB with regards to SQL Server has entered the end of it's life - it has about 7 or 8 years left and "Denali", the next version of SQL Server, will be the last version to support it. The recommendation is to use ODBC going forward.

The reasoning is pretty sound to me:

1. Better cross platform support - yip Microsoft cares about cross platform.
2. Better clound support - No surprise that Microsoft cares about the cloud.
3. I am also assuming that budget is part of this, providing OLE DB & ODBC is two dev teams, two test suites etc… Just doesn’t make sense. Rather consolidate and spend the savings elsewhere.

It is important to note that other OLE DB providers and OLE DB itself are still continuing, we are just talking about SQL Server.

Have a look at the picture to the right only two out of the seven are affected by this announcement, that means there is still a big investment in it and I doubt we we will see OLE DB going away completely anytime soon.

Microsoft has produced a helpful guide to migrating which you can get below.