With the ODBC component of the MDAC SDK, you can use 16-bit and 32-bit applications with 32-bit drivers. The Microsoft® Windows® 95/98 and Microsoft Windows NT®/Windows 2000 operating systems support the following combinations of applications and drivers:
Using a 32-bit application with a 16-bit driver is not supported.
Note Beginning with the release of ODBC version 3.0, Windows NT 4.0 for Intel®, Alpha, and MIPS platforms were supported. However, neither MDAC 2.5 nor Windows 2000 is supported on Alpha plaforms.
ODBC in the MDAC SDK includes the ODBC components necessary to support the above configurations by "thunking" dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) to convert 16-bit addresses to 32-bit addresses and vice versa. The Setup program determines which operating system you are using and installs ODBC components required by that system. You can also choose to install the ODBC components used by all systems.
In most cases, porting an application or driver from 16-bit to 32-bit involves five types of changes:
For information about the first four items, see the Microsoft Platform SDK documentation.
From an application or driver programming standpoint, the major difference between 16-bit and 32-bit ODBC components is that they have different file names. From a system standpoint, the architecture of each application or driver connection is different and the tools used to manage data sources are different.