Native API’s will generally offer the most power, e.g., Oracle OCI.
	But take a lot of effort to learn and use.
	Knowledge is rarely portable to other APIs
	Generic application language interfaces: ODBC and JDBC.
	Still lots of effort to learn
	Knowledge is portable to other APIs
	Power is dependant on quality of ODBC driver
	Pre-compilers for C (where SQL is embedded in C and ‘precompiled’)
	Simpler than a raw C API but typically less power. Hard to debug.
	Command line access - Just type it in!
	Generate SQL from scripts etc.
	Not robust - hard to check for and respond to errors
	Script Languages
	TCL (oratcl, sybtcl) generally much slower. Binary data hard.
	Win32::ODBC - a bottom-up approach - thin layer over raw ODBC calls. DBI is higher level but DBD::ODBC doesn’t yet have the same breadth of ODBC specific functionality. Recommended for existing users and people who need that degree of control.
	DBI+DBD::ODBC can run over twice as fast as Win32::ODBC.
	Sybase - and other database specific perl extensions
	Can gain some performance advantage if well written but loose out on the DBI extras: portable apps & knowledge, tools, subclasses etc.