Comparison of ODBC stage and stages with native support

[sumesh.abraham]

Hi All,

When designing DataStage jobs, when will go for ODBC stage and when to pick stages with native support like Sybase Stage, Oracle OCI stage...etc. My understanding says that ODBC has the advantage that it is portable across multiple dtabases. The disadvantages are that it is limited to windows clients only and it is slower compared to OCI stage for example. I read from a document that 1)ODBC is genrally a higher level protocol than OCI( What does it mean by higher level protocol?).It abstracts away a lot of code, so generaly it is easier to build application quickly using ODBC 3) It is generally easier to debug ODBC applications as fewer memory issues to deal with 4) We can write both source query as well as lookup query in the same stage itself.5)We are having the multi-row lookup facility in this stage. Please clarify.
Pour in your thoughts on the comparison and when to go for ODBC stage.

Thanks in advance,
Sumesh

[sumesh.abraham]

I'm really sorry for putting it twice. I misakenly clicked the submit button again when it was already submitting.

[chulett]

Before someone replies to the other post, you can delete it.

The document you read and listed numbered questions from must have been written from a much lower level standpoint than DataStage - i.e. directly leveraging the ODBC or OCI protocols in C++, for instance so is not valid in this context. Also, #4 is true for all database stages, not just ODBC and no, it is not limited to 'windows clients only'.

In my opinion and as a general rule, ODBC has no advantages over a native stage. None. To me, it is the Stage of Last Resort, the one you use when you have no other choice. Yes, it does support that 'multi-row result set' option but I'll find other ways to accomplish that rather than be forced into ODBC.

As noted, my opinion and I'm sure others feel differently.

[sumesh.abraham]

Chulett,

Thanks a lot for the reply.