[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
WBEM uses variants exclusively to return property values. Thus, the base types that the ODBC adapter must support are the variant types. In addition, WBEM defines the SYNTAX attribute (borrowed from COM) to attribute extra semantics to the type in addition to those semantics the variant type provides. For example, the variant type can be BSTR and the SYNTAX IpAddress, indicating that the variant BSTR is, in fact, an IP address.