[asterisk-dev] Postgres Realtime driver

[gblawler at incodesystems.com]

> What's the performance impact of ODBC vs native?  (Is that extra layer
> negligible for most common tasks?)  Has anyone ever noticed a difference
> or ran any benchmarks?

We use PostgreSQL with an ODBC driver for commercial apps (non- *) and
have found the performance to be fine. I don't know about PostgreSQL
specifically, but don't assume that ODBC means "extra layer". A great many
of the ODBC drivers out there are single layer and therefore have no more
overhead than the "native" method of access. I know MS SQL Server is that
way. MS says that ODBC access to SQL Server is "at least" as fast as
DBLib, and our benchmarks bear that out. ODBC is, in fact, faster than
DBLib for some operations. The big advantage to ODBC is the software you
write can be made to work with any RDBMS backend that has an ODBC driver
(which is about all of them) without ANY change to the software. Also, a
lot of people think of ODBC as an MS thing when in fact it is just an
implementation of the X/Open CLI (Call Level Interface) specification
which is determined by an independent standards body.

Glenn Lawler