Lowest Common Denominator Wins This One

Today I came across this article from Component Developer Magazine about ODBC. I was especially amused (and bemused) by this quote:

At the time of its release, the SQL Server team at Microsoft believed OLE DB would supersede ODBC. This is not longer the case and ODBC's future is completely secure. ODBC is more widely used that OLE DB and it is better suited to some key scenarios that I will discuss later in this article.

I was originally planning to title this post "Old APIs Never Die, And They Never Fade Away Either." The message here, though, seems to indicate (if by omission only) that OLE DB's future is not completely secure. Or maybe I'm just trying to dig too far into the sub-text.

In any case, I believe this is a case where ODBC (as clumsy as some think it is) has won precisely because it is low level, focused on one task, and does not have a lot of proprietary technology that needs to be duplicated across platforms. While ODBC on non-Windows platforms such as Solaris and Linux still has a lot of rough edges, it's generally usable except for the occasional configuration nightmare.

I wonder, on the other hand, what will happen with efforts such as Mono, which are attempting to duplicate a much higher level of functionality and more compilicated interface. As Wikipedia says (today, anyway):

The Microsoft compatibility stack provides a pathway for porting Windows .NET applications to Linux. This group of components include ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and Windows.Forms, among others. As these components are not covered by ECMA standards, some of them remain subject to patent fears and concerns.

Sometimes one's eyes are bigger than one's stomach.