This is a technical question. When answering technical questions, you may want to ask clarifying questions. This will establish your credibility and knowledge in this area and allow you to tweak your answer due to the interviewer changing the questions' parameters. Another way to accomplish this is to start your answer with a statement about your assumption of what the interviewer is asking.

For exampl: "When you say ODBC, I assume you're talking about Open Database Connectivity. This is a method used by applications to communicate with the database. Another term for these is APIs. By creating APIs or ODBCs for their database, database developers make it easy for application developers to create interfaces to the database and easily access the data. Each type of database has its own unique ODBC."