This is an excellent editorial and exactly right on point. ODBC enabled many coders of my generation to make great software systems and in that, a great living. Even better ODBC offers a flexibility not found easily today. In the 90's I worked for a company where we wrote software in Visual FoxPro, and connected to any database that had a solid ODBC driver; SQL, Oracle, DB2, and more. It was "cool", flexible, and it just worked.

As well, down in the "trenches" ODBC was and is overall very easy to work with. You could "ignore the driver behind the curtain" and depend that data would flow in your app as needed. Sure, there were glitches but...

These days we do .NET and for all the wonder, hype, and ill-percieved "must have" of .NET, working directly with data is frankly woefully lacking. Especially so compared to the ODBC days. Data is astounding slow in operations that would otherwise be astoundingly simple, and one of my own biggest complaints is that you would think SQL and .NET would work well together - after all being both MS products. Not so, in fact Microsoft has miles and miles to go in the .NET world to even catch up to the ease of use and performance of ODBC.

Every year we seem to make programming and data management more and more complex with no real gain or benefit. Microsoft's long played-out excuse that this must be the case to support web apps is just simply ridiculous. As well, each year we see old technologies repackaged and then released as something "new", or even more insulting, "revolutionary".

Whatever happened to the KISS principle? ODBC was and is that. It works - so naturally, it will be discontinued and then re-released in another 10 years and sold as "new and revolutionary".