Generic Applications

Generic applications sometimes perform a hard-coded task, such as when a spreadsheet retrieves data from a database. They might also perform a variety of user-defined tasks, such as when a generic query application lets the user enter and execute an SQL statement. What generic applications have in common is that they must work with a variety of different DBMSs and that the developer does not know beforehand what these DBMSs will be.

Therefore, generic applications need to be highly interoperable. The developer must make many choices trading off interoperability for features and must write code that expects drivers to support a wide range of functionality. While generic applications might be tuned to work with popular DBMSs, they rarely contain driver- or DBMS-specific code.