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Custom ODBC Driver for a Progress Application
Many purpose built applications used by corporations are built on Progress from Progress Software. These applications are built in-house or supplied by ISVs. These specialized applications can be of greater value to corporations if the information they contain can be easily accessed by users of third-party reporting, analysis, and development tools. For example, users of Cognos and Excel for reporting would like to use these same tools with the data contained in the Progress based application.
Accessing business information from Progress applications requires one to go through business logic coded in the Progress language. But the business logic in Progress is not easily accessible by non-Progress client applications. For example, one cannot use Business Objects or Brio reporting tools to get to this data.
Recently Progress released its Open Client Toolkit to allow accessing Progress business logic through Java or .NET. This makes it possible for custom applications written in Java and .NET to integrate with Progress applications but it does not open it up to third party reporting and analysis tools. There are ODBC drivers available for the Progress RDMS but these go directly to the data stored in the database and not through the application-specific business logic.
The use of DataDirect® OpenAccess™ SDK to implement a custom ODBC or JDBC driver with full SQL capability is the best solution to make the information in Progress applications widely accessible to power users for custom reporting and analysis. Most of today’s reporting, analysis, and database applications have the ability to interface to data sources through ODBC or JDBC. OpenAccess leverages this widespread support for ODBC to enable Progress application data to be accessed from the front-end tools the customers use (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: OpenAccess Based Solution
