Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a long-standing and established API for connecting to a database. Although there are alternative .NET-specific libraries, such as Entity Framework, ODBC is more general purpose and fits well into an environment where a variety of languages and technology stacks are used.

Many languages have libraries that can take advantage of ODBC. For example, C# can use either ADO.NET or the classes under the System.Data.Odbc namespace to connect to an ODBC data source. In this recipe, we will set up a data source to connect to a SQL Server instance called MySqlInstance.