I believe you are talking about the Microsoft ODBC API which was language and platform agnostic data acquisition layer. Early versions of it had pretty bad perf

I believe you are talking about the Microsoft ODBC API which was language and platform agnostic data acquisition layer. Early versions of it had pretty bad performance issues if I remember correctly, but eventually it became somewhat useful. I believe that developers back in the 90's wanted a way to "drop in" various low and higher cost DBMS systems to their client-server based apps without the need of hiring full-time database sysops.