odbc 4 all is a 32 bit windows utility designed to easily allow any application, including dos, to run sql queries using any odbc data source, (access, informix, mysql, oracle, sql server, ...), redirecting the output to the screen, an ascii file / table or a dbf table. when run in interactive mode, you can interactively choose the odbc data source and table, then insert the sql command to send to the database server to see the resulting data on a screen grid. to use it inside a 3rd party application, you can create an ascii configuration file, then run odbc4all.exe to obtain the results of the sql query into the desired output format. in this case user intervention is not required. even the error messages could be redirected to an ascii file (for example if the sql query contains a syntax error, or if the database server is unreachable because the server pc is down) allowing the running application to check for errors before managing the results. ascii tables are particularly useful to obtain data views which are automatically printable using our printfil - windows printing system for applications software: http://www.guolo.com/printfil the two modes can be mixed, allowing you to run it in interactive mode obtaining an ascii output file or to run it from within your application only to automatically show the results of the query to the user.