The advantage to system-wide registration of drivers (however that's accomplished) is of course that it allows driver authors to provide a single installer or set of instructions for the driver to be installed without regard for different usage scenarios. So if Tableau and Excel can both use ODBC drivers, then I (as a hypothetical author of a niche driver) don't have to solve N installation problems for N possible use cases. And my spouse (as a non-developer finance user) can just run one installer and know that the data source will be available in multiple tools. Or at least that's the principle.
For a real-world example, compare the instructions for installing ODBC drivers into Tableau ( https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/examples_otherdatabases.htm ) with those for installing JDBC drivers ( https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/examples_otherdatabases_jdbc.htm ). The JDBC instructions include copying or installing files to a specific directory which possibly needs to be created. The ODBC instructions ... don't. With what I'm most immediately invested in -- database drivers for Microsoft Power BI -- part of the problem actually ends up being that many drivers are closed source and/or not freely redistributable. So for someone to use Power BI with Oracle, they either need a way to install Oracle drivers onto their machine in a standard way which lets us find them or we need to go through a painful and sometimes expensive "biz dev" effort to get the right to redistribute those drivers and install them ourselves. I am of course aware that there can also be significant downsides to such system-wide registration. -Curt On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 7:23 AM Antoine Pitrou <anto...@python.org> wrote: > > Also, with ADBC driver implementations currently in flux (none of them > has reached the "stable" status in > https://arrow.apache.org/adbc/main/driver/status.html), it might be a > disservice to users to implicitly fetch drivers from potentially > outdated DLLs on the current system. > > Regards > > Antoine. > > > Le 20/03/2024 à 15:08, Matt Topol a écrit : > >> it seems like the current driver manager work has been largely targeting > > an app-specific implementation. > > > > Yup, that was the intention. So far discussions of ADBC having a > > system-wide driver registration paradigm like ODBC have mostly been to > > discuss how much we dislike that paradigm and would prefer ADBC to stay > > with the app-specific approach that we currently have. :) > > > > As of yet, no one has requested such a paradigm so the discussions > haven't > > gotten revived. > > > > On Wed, Mar 20, 2024 at 9:22 AM David Coe <david....@microsoft.com > .invalid> > > wrote: > > > >> ODBC has different OS-level driver managers available on their > respective > >> systems. It seems like the current driver manager< > >> https://arrow.apache.org/adbc/main/cpp/driver_manager.html> work has > been > >> largely targeting an app-specific implementation. Have there been any > >> discussions of ADBC having a similar system-wide driver registration > >> paradigm like ODBC does? > >> > > >
