ASA Getting Started
  Connecting Your Application to its Database

Introduction to connections

Any client application that uses a database must establish a connection to that database before any work can be done. The connection forms a channel through which all activity from the client application takes place. For example, your user ID determines permissions to carry out actions on the database—and the database server has your user ID because it is part of the request to establish a connection.

Many client applications, including application development systems, use the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface to access Adaptive Server Anywhere. An ODBC data source is a set of connection parameters that are stored in the registry or in a file.

You can use ODBC data sources to connect to Adaptive Server Anywhere databases from any of the following applications:

• Sybase Central and Interactive SQL.

• All the Adaptive Server Anywhere utilities.

• PowerDesigner and InfoMaker.

• Any application development environment that supports ODBC, such as Microsoft Visual Basic, Sybase PowerBuilder, and Borland Delphi.

Adaptive Server Anywhere client applications on UNIX can use ODBC data sources. On UNIX, the data source is stored as a file.

Adaptive Server Anywhere supports several programming interfaces in addition to ODBC. For more information, see Introduction to connections.