Full ODBC was later ported back to those platforms, and became a de facto standard considerably better known than CLI. ODBC retained several features that were removed as part of the CLI effort. ODBC was originally developed by Microsoft and Simba Technologies during the early 1990s, and became the basis for the Call Level Interface (CLI) standardized by SQL Access Group in the Unix and mainframe field. Drivers exist for all major DBMSs, many other data sources like address book systems and Microsoft Excel, and even for text or comma-separated values (CSV) files. Any ODBC-compliant application can access any DBMS for which a driver is installed. An application that can use ODBC is referred to as 'ODBC-compliant'. An ODBC driver can be thought of as analogous to a printer driver or other driver, providing a standard set of functions for the application to use, and implementing DBMS-specific functionality. The application uses ODBC functions through an ODBC driver manager with which it is linked, and the driver passes the query to the DBMS. ODBC accomplishes DBMS independence by using an ODBC driver as a translation layer between the application and the DBMS. An application written using ODBC can be ported to other platforms, both on the client and server side, with few changes to the data access code. The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. In computing, Open Database Connectivity ( ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). ODBC, standard interface for accessing database systems

Paradox 7 odbc driver for mac