IBM Data Server DB2 - Manual (Page 168)

154 DB2 Deployment Guide
4.3 Deploying C/C++ applications
C and C++ are probably two of the most popular and well-known programming
languages. They are general purpose programming languages developed in the
1970’s. The prevalence of these two languages still continues today on almost all
operating systems even though Java and other languages have achieved great
success.
DB2 provides various sets of APIs for C/C++ programmer for their choices.
For users who are focusing on application development and accessing a DB2
database from applications, CLI and ODBC provide the programming interfaces
and use dynamic SQL statements as function arguments.
Another option is embedded SQL. It takes the advantages of both static and
dynamic SQL statements to access the database. Embedded SQL statements
are placed in the host programming languages and therefore an additional
procedure called precompilation is required. Precompilation transforms the
embedded SQL statements into the host language function calls which are
recognizable codes for the host language compiler. Not only C and C++, but also
COBOL, FORTRAN, and REXX are supported host languages for the embedded
programming.
There are other tasks which are critical for DB2 maintenance or administration,
such as instance start and stop, runstats and reorg, and so on. To perform these
administrative tasks against DB2, users can issue commands from CLP, invoke
SQL routines, or use DB2 Administrative APIs. DB2 Administrative APIs, also
known as DB2 APIs, are a set of callable interfaces that give the customer an
easy way to administer DB2 from a programming language. It could be used
together with either CLI and ODBC, or embedded SQL.
4.3.1 CLI and ODBC
In this section, we discuss an approach to bundle an application and the IBM
Data Server Driver for ODBC and CLI in a single package. This package can
then be a deployed to other systems. The operating system that our procedure is
based upon is either Linux or UNIX.
Before getting to the sample application and deployment script, we first discuss
some background and considerations for CLI and ODBC applications.
DB2 Call Level Interface (DB2 CLI) is IBM’s callable SQL interface to the DB2
family of database servers. It is a C and C++ programming interface. DB2 CLI is
based on the Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) specification and
the International Standard for SQL/CLI. These specifications are the basis for