The production release of Oracle Database Programming Interface for C (ODPI-C) is now available on GitHub (https://github.com/oracle/odpi). ODPI-C is an open source library of C code that simplifies access to Oracle Database for applications written in C or C++. It is available as source code on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 and/or the Oracle UPL licenses, for direct inclusion into a code base.
The availability was announced in an Oracle blog by Christopher Jones, senior principal product manager at Oracle.
According to Jones, ODPI-C is a wrapper over the Oracle Call Interface. OCI is Oracle Database's main C API and is widely used by Oracle products and user applications. OCI's API is flexible and gives fine-grained control to the developer for a range of use cases.
ODPI-C exposes C API functionality in a readily consumable way to C and C++ developers writing applications for Oracle Database and is aimed at language interfaces and applications where speed of development is important, and where special-case Oracle features are not needed. ODPI-C is already being used for Python, Node.js, Go and Rust interfaces, as well as for custom applications.
ODPI-C advantages is that it allows faster application implementation with less code, makes memory and resource management simpler, particularly for “binding” and “defining” data. In addition, a reference counting mechanism adds resiliency by stopping applications destroying in-use resources.
ODPI-C is developed by the Oracle Database Data Access team, with Anthony Tuininga leading the ODPI-C effort.
To read the blog, go to https://blogs.oracle.com/opal/open-source-library-drives-powerful-oracle-database-applications, and for detailed instructions, go to https://oracle.github.io/odpi/doc/installation.html.