That depends, it was easy for me becuase I had the odbc drivers for my various mainframes which I use.

ODBC for main frames, require that your mainfram / programmer / service company install usually a odbc driver on the server, then on your client machine, you install the the odbc driver. ... usually thats pretty straight forward. (but there might be a cost for one or both of the drivers..... ) check with your mainframe company/programmers...

one you are connected with odbc, then, withing vfp you create a connection to the mainframe. and select right from there, the mainframe tables, and create views you can browse / read copy etc, just as they were local dbf's
It can get complex, if you dont know the data stru of the mainframe database..

Or, you could use something called sql passthrough, actually issuing sql commands on your main frame directly. Its a text .prg way of doing this, a lttle harder to do the first time, but... its a little faster when you are running.

All in all, what odbc is, is a connection, to your database, and the language you use to communicate once you are 'connected' is SQL.


>yes but how do i connect to my mainframe using odbc?