If you can access your data source from the computer on which PV‑WAVE is running, you can connect to the data source from within PV‑WAVE. This eliminates the need to export the data to a file before importing it into PV‑WAVE.

You can query or update your data source from PV‑WAVE using the same Structured Query Language (SQL) commands supported by your local DBMS. You do not need to learn new syntax or complicated function and procedure calls.

For database queries, PV‑WAVE ODBC Connection retrieves all of the rows and columns specified by the SQL statement. The results of the query are placed in a PV‑WAVE table variable, in which each row of the query is a row in an array of type structure.

For other types of SQL statements, PV‑WAVE ODBC Connection sends the command directly to the data source. These commands can be used to insert, update, or delete data in the data source.

If your data source and ODBC driver are Level 2 compliant, you can perform read-only cursor operations on data source objects. Cursor operations allow you to retrieve part of the rows generated by a query. One application of this feature is that you can retrieve the data from a single query incrementally, processing each subset before requesting the next one. Refer to the PV‑WAVE ODBC Connection functions ODBC_PREPARE and ODBC_FETCH for more information.

You can connect to multiple ODBC drivers and/or data sources in the same PV‑WAVE session, even when the data sources are administered by the same DBMS. In addition, if a particular ODBC driver and data source support multiple connections to the same data source, you can maintain multiple connections to the same data source in the same PV‑WAVE session.

PV‑WAVE ODBC Connection imports query data into a PV‑WAVE table variable. This format is very convenient for using other PV‑WAVE procedures and functions to analyze and display the data from the query. Almost all PV‑WAVE functions can access the data directly from the table. In addition, PV‑WAVE has some procedures and functions that are specially designed to work with table variables. For more information, refer to the PV‑WAVE functions BUILD_TABLE, QUERY_TABLE, UNIQUE, GROUP_BY, and ORDER_BY.