Yes indeed, why use the ODBC API directly at all? The simple answer is that you should use the ODBC API directly when you can do something with it that you can’t do any other way. So the question should be rephrased: What can I do with ODBC that I can’t do with something else? This question isn’t quite so easy to answer because other data access methods use the main parts of ODBC functionality; they even add value by using techniques such as caching to improve performance so that you don’t have to add performance code yourself. I will show you just a few things here that you can do using the ODBC API directly. I hope this will provide you with enough incentive to get hold of the ODBC SDK and see for yourself just how good ODBC is.