Spreadsheets are good at managing small to moderate amounts of data. Once your models start dealing with large amounts of data, database management systems (DBMSs) are, unquestionably, the tool of choice. Also, in many business modeling situations, you will find most, if not all, of the data is contained in one or more databases. For these reasons, LINGO supports links to any DBMS that has an Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) driver (effectively all popular DBMSs). ODBC defines a standardized interface to DBMSs. Given this standardized interface, LINGO can access any database that supports ODBC.

LINGO has one interface function for accessing databases. This function's name is @ODBC. The @ODBC function is used to import data from and export data to any ODBC data source. @ODBC is currently available only in Windows versions of LINGO.

At present, the ODBC connection is only supported under Windows versions of LINGO.