Third-party "wire-level" products depend upon a third-party reverse-engineering of the database server's network protocols, meaning they can crash your database server. Customers may lose data or have data compromised by hackers and experience downtime trying to recover when so-called "wire-level" drivers are used either intentionally, or in Internet-virus form like "SQLSlammer". Actually paying someone for a "wire-level" driver may even encourage the spread of such viruses since quite often, they are releasing their reverse-engineering work out into the "open source" world. Here is one example that came directly from the July 2003 FreeTDS release note. [Note: This type of problem may happen with MS-SQLServer, SYBASE or any database server being accessed through unofficial "wire-level" means.]

"Do Not Use FreeTDS 0.61 with TDS version 4.2 to connect to Sybase 12.5. Please! While we don't like to put the bad news first, neither do we want YOU to hurt YOUR server. Late in the release cycle, we found that our implementation of TDS 4.2 gives Sybase 12.5 a bad case of heartburn. In short: it crashed the server. We don't know what it is about our version of TDS 4.2 that Sybase 12.5 doesn't like, and we'll be looking closely at that question. But in the meanwhile, until we can find the problem and fix it, please don't use that combination. Unless you want to help us test it, that is." (emphasis ours)

ODBC ROUTER does not emulate proprietary client/server protocols used between the database server and its Windows client as FreeTDS and other unsound "wire-level" solutions do.

ODBC ROUTER cleanly interfaces to applications and database servers via their officially supported ODBC interfaces.

"Mac, Linux and Windows applications make efficient binary calls to ODBC. Next, the ODBC ROUTER transparently passes those calls (in binary form) to the database server's official Windows ODBC driver (on a Windows Server). Finally, ODBC ROUTER returns any results to the client application (in binary form). Each entire cycle operates with system-level efficiency."

ODBC ROUTER also does NOT require the server to do any per-transaction data-transformations or produce a spreadsheet (XML) document after each query. Instead, ODBC ROUTER uses a high-performance network transport that is the result of three years of development. This means ODBC ROUTER delivers faster response-time and more server capacity than competitive offerings can provide.