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<chapter>
  <header>
    <copyright>
      <year>2002</year><year>2013</year>
      <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
    </copyright>
    <legalnotice>
      Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
      you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
      You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
          http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

      Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
      distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
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    </legalnotice>

    <title>Introduction</title>
    <prepared>Ingela Anderton</prepared>
    <responsible></responsible>
    <docno></docno>
    <approved></approved>
    <checked></checked>
    <date>2002-09-17</date>
    <rev>A</rev>
    <file>introduction.xml</file>
  </header>

  <section>
    <title>Purpose</title>
    <p>The purpose of the Erlang ODBC application is to provide the
      programmer with an ODBC interface that has a Erlang/OTP touch and
      feel. So that the programmer may concentrate on solving his/her
      actual problem instead of struggling with pointers and memory
      allocation which is not very relevant for Erlang. This user guide
      will give you some information about technical issues and provide
      some examples of how to use the Erlang ODBC interface.</p>
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>Prerequisites</title>
    <p>It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang
      programming language, concepts of OTP and has a basic
      understanding of relational databases and SQL.</p>
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>About ODBC</title>
    <p>Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a Microsoft standard for
      accessing relational databases that has become widely used. The
      ODBC standard provides a c-level application programming
      interface (API) for database access. It uses Structured Query
      Language (SQL) as its database access language.</p>
  </section>

  <section>
    <title>About the Erlang ODBC application</title>
    <p>Provides an Erlang interface to communicate with relational
      SQL-databases. It is built on top of Microsofts ODBC interface and
      therefore requires that you have an ODBC driver to the database
      that you want to connect to. The Erlang ODBC application is designed 
      using the version 3.0 of the ODBC-standard, however using the option
      <c>{scrollable_cursors, off} </c> for a connection has been known
      to make it work for at least some 2.X drivers.</p>
  </section>
</chapter>


