ODBC from OpenEdge without DataDirect?

Question

In which way can I access another database (not OpenEdge) via ODBC from OpenEdge without using DataDirect?

The use case is data migration from one system to another, so performance cannot be neglected completely but it's a one time thing that is allowed to take a little longer.

Why without DataDirect? Extra cost. Our client doesn't have the license. Why not dump and load (via CSV f.e.)? The client doesn't want to do the mapping between the systems this way but with database views.

Answer 1

Looking at the website there are downloadable ODBC drivers for most platforms:

https://www.progress.com/odbc/openedge

Answer 2

As far as I know there is no way to directly access other database if you're not using DataDirect or something like DataServer for Oracle etc.

However, you could call a third party ODBC library as external functions, and write your handle your queries to the foreign database by accessing. This wouldn't allow you to use OpenEdge constructs like FOR EACH, buffers etc, but it would allow you to retrieve the data and process it using custom functions, and then insert into the OpenEdge tables etc.

See the following KB for accessing external library functions: https://knowledgebase.progress.com/articles/Article/P183546

Another approach you could use, assuming your tables are in OpenEdge already, is to use the OpenEdge SQL92 ODBC driver from another language (C/VB/Java/whatever works for you), and read the data from the source database and insert into OpenEdge via SQL92 ODBC.