OLE DB is dead, long live ODBC

Published on 30 August 2011 • Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

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Microsoft has announced that OLE DB with regard to SQL Server has entered the end of its 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—yes, Microsoft cares about cross-platform compatibility.
2. Better cloud support—No surprise that Microsoft cares about the cloud.
3. I am also assuming budget is part of this: providing OLE DB and ODBC requires two dev teams, two test suites, etc. It 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 seven are affected by this announcement, which means there is still a big investment in it. I doubt we will see OLE DB going away completely anytime soon.

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