I cannot count how many times I’ve been asked about the deprecation of Microsoft OLE DB for SQL Server. My best guess? Hundreds of times over the years. My reply to questions has been: “I do not believe Microsoft will deprecate the OLE DB Driver for SQL Server.”

In data integration circles, the announcement in August 2011 was wildly unpopular. Why? From a data load perspective, ODBC is slower – much slower most of the time. I was a SQL Server MVP at the time of the announcement and there was an… interesting… exchange on the topic on the MVP mailing list.

It’s Alive!

Last month Microsoft “undeprecated” the OLE DB Driver for SQL Server and announced a new version during 2018-Q1. There are a couple gotchas. As explained in the article:

“…this first upcoming release will be a stand-alone install package that is out-of-band with SQL Server lifecycle. This also means the driver will not be packaged in the SNAC library, nor coupled with any other driver.”

Most SSIS packages use OLE DB for data flow operations because OLE DB often (not always) outperforms the alternatives. The difference in performance between ODBC and OLE DB performance in data integration scenarios can be orders of magnitude.

Kudos to Microsoft for revising this decision.

Thanks to Meagan Longoria (Data Savvy blog|@mmarie) for tweeting about this – I completely missed it!

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