>Is it possible to connect to and query an Oracle database without going through ODBC? We all know that ODBC tends to slow things down considerably, can it be bypassed?

Hmm...the only kludge I can think of is finding an Oracle mini-app that is OLE compliant. Using this you might be able to issue an SQL directly to Oracle and get the results back....heh, I have my doubts that this could be any faster, but at least its an alternative ;).

By the way, I've been told by several people that using Oracle as a backend via ODBC is very fast if you have your views set up correctly and your DBA has Oracle optimized properly.