Phil Parkin (10/9/2012)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (7/28/2008)
Good explanation. OLEDB is newer and superceeds ODBC. You should aim to use OLEDB connections where possible. I believe there's an OLEDB provider that encapsulates all ODBC functionality.Steve, I think this may not be the best advice.
Looks to me as though OLEDB is being deprecated. Here's another link which discusses the topic.
That was actually interesting link to read. Especially the part about
Microsoft has been supporting ODBC through all the releases of SQL Server for relational data access. This includes adding new functionality to the ODBC drivers whenever a corresponding feature is added to SQL Server.
I've developed an application few years ago, which needed to receive and display in GUI long stored procedure progress. Progress messages were implemented in stored proc using RAISERROR (of message severity) WITH NOWAIT which allows receiving such messages asynchronously by the client. It is possible using ADO InfoMessage handling. But, I only managed to get it working properly using ODBC driver! All other drivers, for some reason, would get all InfoMessage events accumulated and raised at once on the end of process. I was really surprised that time why "old" ODBC driver did work but newest SQL Server Native Client didn't...
Looks like MS always treated ODBC as the most up-to-date driver.