If we were to add DBMS support to LISTSERV today, we would definitely start
with ODBC and MySQL. But we did this in 1998. Back then, there wasn't even
anything to argue internally at development meetings. The only sensible
thing to do was implement ODBC on Windows and Oracle on unix and VMS. Later,
as DB2 gained market share and Oracle got the great idea of pricing their
products based on the number of MHz of your processor (you had to send them
a check every time you upgraded your hardware - great for them, or so they
thought until customers jumped ship), we looked into adding support for DB2,
and found that it would take less than a day of work, since IBM chose CLI as
DB2's native interface. CLI is almost identical to ODBC, you could say that
the one is the official standard whereas the other is the de facto standard.
In practice, the only difference for LISTSERV was that some data types had
different names (this is no longer the case). There are also differences in
obscure minor functions that LISTSERV does not use, but we were able to add
DB2 support very easily, and it made life much easier for customers who
could not afford to keep Oracle.

Unfortunately, MySQL did not choose CLI as its API, but something completely
different from both CLI and Oracle's OCI. When we prepared the 14.4 feature
list, the MyODBC connector only supported MySQL version 3.x, but there was
talk of a new MyODBC that would support current versions of MySQL. We
decided to wait for this new MyODBC rather than spend time on the old one.

We provided JDBC support in LISTSERV Maestro, which was the logical place to
do that since it is written in Java.

  Eric