Standards and Portability

These standards affect the development of relational databases:

• ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard.

• X/OPEN (European body) standard.

• ISO (International Standards Institute) SQL standard.

Ideally, industry standards enable users to work identically with different relational database systems. Although each major vendor supports industry standards, it also offers extensions to enhance the functionality of the SQL language. Vendors also periodically release upgrades and new versions of their products.

These extensions and upgrades affect portability. Due to the industry impact of software development, applications need a standard interface to databases that is not affected by differences between database vendors. When a vendor provides a new release, the affect on existing applications should be minimal. To solve many of these portability issues, many organizations use standard database interfaces called open database connectivity (ODBC).