Interoperability is the ability of a single application to operate with many different DBMSs. The need to write generic, interoperable applications was one of the major factors leading to the development of ODBC. However, interoperability is not a simple path followed from not interoperable to completely interoperable. The path has many branches and each requires trade-offs between features, speed, code complexity, and development time.
The process of writing an interoperable application follows several steps:
Decide whether the application will use ODBC at all.
Choose a level of interoperability and decide what tradeoffs are necessary to
reach that level.
Write interoperable code and test it as fully as possible.
Before continuing, it should be noted that interoperability is primarily the domain of the application writer. Drivers are designed to work with a single DBMS and, by definition, are not interoperable. They play a role in interoperability by correctly implementing and exposing ODBC over a single DBMS.