MDAC 2.5 SDK - ODBC Programmer's Reference
Appendix D: Data Types

Transferring Data in Its Binary Form

An application can safely transfer data (in the internal form used by a specified DBMS) between two data sources that use the same DBMS and hardware platform. For a given piece of data, the SQL data types must be the same in the source and target data sources. The C data type is SQL_C_BINARY.

When the application calls SQLFetch, SQLFetchScroll, or SQLGetData to retrieve the data from the source data source, the driver retrieves the data from the data source and transfers it, without conversion, to a storage location of type SQL_C_BINARY. When the application calls SQLBulkOperations, SQLExecute, SQLExecDirect, SQLPutData, or SQLSetPos to send the data to the target data source, the driver retrieves the data from the storage location and transfers it, without conversion, to the target data source.

Note   Applications that transfer any data (except binary data) in this manner are not interoperable among DBMSs.

SQLCopyDesc can be used to copy row bindings from the source DBMS to parameter bindings in the target DBMS.