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 and when not.

Thanks in advance,
Sumesh

[ray.wurlod]

ODBC when you don't have a native stage type, for example extracting from Red Brick Warehouse or dBase. Native stage type when you do.