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<chapter>
  <header>
    <copyright>
      <year>2002</year><year>2009</year>
      <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
    </copyright>
    <legalnotice>
      The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License,
      Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in
      compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the
      Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be
      retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/.
    
      Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS"
      basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See
      the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations
      under the License.
    
    </legalnotice>

    <title>Introduction</title>
    <prepared>Ingela Anderton</prepared>
    <responsible></responsible>
    <docno></docno>
    <approved></approved>
    <checked></checked>
    <date>2002-09-17</date>
    <rev>A</rev>
    <file>introduction.xml</file>
  </header>

  <section>
    <title>Purpose</title>
    <p>The purpose of the Erlang ODBC application is to provide the
      programmer with an ODBC interface that has a Erlang/OTP touch and
      feel. So that the programmer may concentrate on solving his/her
      actual problem instead of struggling with pointers and memory
      allocation which is not very relevant for Erlang. This user guide
      will give you some information about technical issues and provide
      some examples of how to use the Erlang ODBC interface.</p>
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>Prerequisites</title>
    <p>It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang
      programming language, concepts of OTP and has a basic
      understanding of relational databases and SQL.</p>
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>About ODBC</title>
    <p>Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a Microsoft standard for
      accessing relational databases that has become widely used. The
      ODBC standard provides a c-level application programming
      interface (API) for database access. It uses Structured Query
      Language (SQL) as its database access language.</p>
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>About the Erlang ODBC application</title>
    <p>Provides an Erlang interface to communicate with relational
      SQL-databases. It is built on top of Microsofts ODBC interface and
      therefore requires that you have an ODBC driver to the database
      that you want to connect to. The Erlang ODBC application is designed 
      using the version 3.0 of the ODBC-standard, however using the option
      <c>{scrollable_cursors, off} </c> for a connection has been known
      to make it work for at least some 2.X drivers.</p>
  </section>
</chapter>


