What Is FDO Provider for ODBC?

The Feature Data Objects (FDO) API provides access to data in a data store. A provider is a specific implementation of the FDO API that provides access to data in a particular data store. The FDO Provider for ODBC provides FDO with access to an ODBC-based data store.

The FDO Provider for ODBC can access simple x, y, z feature objects that can run in a multi-platform environment, including Windows, Linux, and UNIX.

The FDO Provider for ODBC has the following characteristics:

The FDO Provider for ODBC supports the definition of one or more feature classes in terms of any relational database table that contains an X, Y, and optionally, Z columns.
Metadata, which maps the table name, and X, Y, and optionally, Z columns to a feature class, is maintained outside the database in a configuration file. This information, in conjunction with the table structure in the database, provides the definition of the feature class.
The x, y, and z locations of objects are stored in separate properties in the primary object definition of a feature, but are accessible through a single class property ‘Geometry’.
Read-only access is provided to pre-existing data defined and populated through 3rd party applications (that is, FDO Provider for ODBC will not be responsible for defining the physical schema of the data store nor for populating the object data).
The schema configuration of the data store is provided to the FDO Provider for ODBC through an optional XML file containing the Geographic Markup Language (GML) definition of the schema that maps ‘tables’ and ‘columns’ in the data store to feature classes and property mappings in the FDO data model.

NoteMicrosoft Excel (must have at least one named range; do not use DATABASE or other reserved words as a range name).

For more information, see The Essential FDO (FET_TheEssentialFDO.pdf) and the OSGeo FDO Provider for ODBC API Reference Help (ODBC_Provider_API.chm).