anyone experienced using ODBC to connect to an adobe BC site?

Anything 3rd party you need to use the provided API with BC and run your server side code on another system.

As Liam said, you can not connect to the database directly nor use any serverside code, you need to use the SOAP API to get access to the data.

Although in saying that you can sync the BC data to a local database and use anything you want to access the data that way.