SageForum for UK versions of Sage 50- Help and support.

Hi,

Could we use Sage 50 UK ODBC driver as a reliable source for data fetching by a .net desktop application?

I have a desktop .net application that connects to Sage ODBC Driver for fetching few lists instead of using the SDK. Data is polled once everyday or on manual request. And for posting transactions, SDK is used.

Is it advisable to use ODBC than the SDK for data fetching?

When asked Sage support team, they said ODBC is not supported by them and it does have limitations like - "The ODBC driver exists as a by-product of the Sage 50 Accounts Report design engine and is used primarily to compile reporting information. It is not known to be fully ODBC II compliant and may also return deleted data."

Your mileage may vary.

It depends on what you are doing, how big the database is and so on.

You should try it an see.

ODBC is slow.

Thanks for the response!

Our customers could potentially have heavy data. To overcome pulling full data everyday, my app would be fetching the data modified from a certain Date.

And its for the same reason that I was debating whether to switch from SDK to ODBC as SDK doesn't have querying by Date filter with pagination.

1. Do you have any suggestions for implementing querying data with Date filter with pagination using SDK?
2. Do you know if SageODBC driver is odbc compliant? Sagesoft support team said it isn't. What I have seen so far is it doesnt support few querying options(LIMIT, OFFSET etc) but still can be manageable?
3. Does Sage support ODBC, couldn't find any support team details


Thanks!

I don't use the SDK it is expensive, I use a 3rd party tool to write my integrations for others.

The ODBC drivers are slow, they use a comma as a separator or something like that, which makes some SQL ambiguous.

It is what the report designer uses and is functional for many if not most purposes.

You need to do a test to see if either is quicker than the other in your scenario.