Goodbye ODBC
While working with a client recently, I learned that Microsoft is planning to cut out support for ODBC data sources. In the case of this client, they still have some data in older, proprietary data sources that are only accessible through an ODBC DSN. They are attempting to move forward with some newer Microsoft technologies (SharePoint, for example), but cannot seem to link to this data source. I worked with Microsoft on this issue, and they directed me to this article.

The article states thats that it is strongly recommended to move to native OLE DB components. I thought the OLE DB provider for ODBC was a native OLE DB component (just one that has to communicate through the ODBC layer). This will make it difficult for companies who are still using older proprietary systems to move up to the newer technologies. For my client, they wanted to display data in a SharePoint web part, but this lack of support makes it impossible. In my opinion, it's still a little early to discontinue ODBC support.