Sequel

Sequel is an object-oriented wrapper for ODBC implementation for Win32 platforms. It means that the ODBC API is wrapped into classes, which represent all data structures and routines needed to work with databases with taken of SQL. The goal was to create fast and efficient database engine based on the SQL standard providing the same interface for different database systems, which are capable to support SQL - e.g. Oracle, MS SQL Server and MS Access. Till today there are many database engines, but almost all of them are either too much difficult to understand or they are not so much fast because they are too much complex. ODBC itself is a low-level programming interface, while Sequel is the high-level one. This guarantees that your application will work with the database directly without any detour via third database provider/engine. In other words, with Sequel you're getting a high level interface for low-level database API with maximum universality without any ballast causing a slow down.
Sequel is written as an automation object - the COM server. This means, that you can use it with any programming language, which can take advantage of COM. Because of this, the area of usability covers programming with e.g. Delphi, C++ Builder, Visual Studio, Visual Basic Scripting and creating of active server pages. As it is apparent from this text, you can use both bindings - early and late. This gives you the possibility to choose how tight to bind your applications to ODBC.
Sequel is so much simple as possible to achieve the maximum performance. This results into the less count of database methods, which are logically implemented as objects' methods, simply uniform data handling and utilizing all of features provided by a database system in the SQL way. Pure SQL utilization is the next reason of the achieved speed and efficiency, because modern database systems are more efficient when using SQL instead of a set of database API calls as they are able to generate optimum access plan taking the request of database system knowledge away from you. All you have to do is to show data to the user with taken of some graphic visualization, so that it can rise up the productivity.
From the point of view of program environment, the ODBC implementation can be installed on all Win32 systems. Microsoft provides installation of ODBC for Win32 and it's free. Even except Windows 95 it is already installed as a part of operating system.