iODBC Driver Manager

Copyright (C) 1995 Ke Jin kejin@empress.com. Copyright (C) 1996-2026 OpenLink Software iodbc@openlinksw.com.

License

Copyright 1996-2025 OpenLink Software

This software is released under either the GNU Library General Public License (see LICENSE.LGPL) or the BSD License (see LICENSE.BSD).

Note: The only valid version of the GPL license as far as this project is concerned is the original GNU General Public License Version 2, dated June 1991.

Contributions

While not mandated by the BSD license, any patches you make to the iODBC project may be contributed back into the project at your discretion. Contributions will benefit the Open Source and Data Access community as a whole. Submissions may be made via the iODBC Github project or via email to iodbc@openlinksw.com.

Introduction

Welcome to the iODBC driver manager maintained by OpenLink Software.

This kit will provide you with everything you need to develop ODBC-compliant applications under Unix without having to pay royalties to other parties.

This kit consists of a number of parts:

• The iODBC driver manager. This is a complete implementation of an ODBC driver manager, released under either the GNU Library General Public License or the BSD License. We fully comply with these licenses by giving you this product in source form (as well as the binary form). You can download the latest version of the driver manager from the iODBC website.

• A simple example application, iodbctest.c, which gives you a command-line interface to SQL. You can fit this to your purposes, but at the very least this is useful for verification of your ODBC installation.

You can use either part stand-alone, if you wish.

An ODBC driver is still needed to affect your connection architecture. You may build a driver with the iODBC components or obtain an ODBC driver from a commercial vendor. OpenLink Software produces cross-platform commercial drivers as well as maintaining the iODBC distribution: evaluation copies may be obtained via download from the OpenLink Software website. Any ODBC-compliant driver will work with the iODBC Driver Manager.

You can see the iODBC website for pointers to various ODBC drivers.

Installation of run-time distribution

You have probably already unpacked this distribution. The next step is to make sure that your applications can find all the dynamic link libraries. Depending on your system's implementation of dynamic link libraries, you have a number of options:

• Install the libraries in a directory that is searched by your linker by default. Typical locations are /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib.

• Install the libraries in some other place, and make sure that the environment variable your dynamic linker uses to find extra locations for dynamic link libraries. Most systems use the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to this end. Known exceptions include AIX which uses LIBPATH, and HP/UX which uses SHLIB_PATH for 32-bit libraries.

If your system has a C compiler, you can verify the installation by compiling the iodbctest program. Otherwise, you may have ODBC applications installed on your system which you can use.

Configuration of run-time distribution

The iODBC driver manager looks for a file ~/.odbc.ini, where the tilde stands for the user's home directory. This file initially contains only a default section where you can select which driver library to use. Copy the odbc.ini file from the examples directory to ~/.odbc.ini and make sure the right path and filename is used for your installation.

A data source is a section (enclosed in square brackets), and the attributes for a data source are given within this section. The most important attribute to iODBC for each datasource is the Driver attribute. This must point to the shared library for the ODBC driver associated with the data source.

For example, the OpenLink Enterprise Edition (Multi-Tier) ODBC drivers have a number of attributes which can be set for a data source. Here is a description:

| odbc.ini keyword | ODBC connect string keyword | Description | |--------------------|-----------------------------|-----| | Host | HOST | The hostname where the database resides. | | ServerType | SVT | The type of Database Agent. (See oplrqb.ini on the server.) | | ServerOptions | SVO | Server-specific extra options. See Enterprise Edition server-side documentation for Agents which can use this. | | Database | DATABASE | The database to use. | | Options | OPTIONS | Connect options for the database. | | UserName | UID | The name of the database user. | | Password | PWD | The password of the database user. | | ReadOnly | READONLY | A Yes/No value in order to make the connection read-only. | | FetchBufferSize | FBS | The number of records that are transferred in a single call to the server. Default is 5; maximum is 999; minimum is 1. | | Protocol | PROTO | The protocol to use. Set to TCP for Release 3.x and later. |

Apart from these data source-specific settings, you may add a section called [Communications], which you may use to tune the OpenLink Enterprise Edition (Multi-Tier) driver further:

| odbc.ini keyword | Description | |--------------------|-------------| | ReceiveTimeout | The time in seconds that the client application will wait for the Database Agent to start sending results. Default is 60. | | BrokerTimeout | The time in seconds that the client application will wait for the Request Broker to accept or reject a database connection request. Default is 30. | | SendSize | RPC send buffer size. A value of 0 (the default) will cause the application to use system-dependent defaults. | | ReceiveSize | RPC receive buffer size. A value of 0 (the default) will cause the application to use system-dependent defaults. | | DebugFile | If set, the name of a file to which debugging output from the driver should be directed. |

iODBC driver manager platform availability

The iODBC driver manager has been ported to following platforms:

| OS | Version | Processor | |------------------|---------------|----------------------------------------------- | | BSDi BSD/OS | 2.x | x86 | | DEC Unix (OSF/1) | 3.x - 5.x | DEC Alpha | | DG/UX | 5.x | Aviion | | FreeBSD | 2.x - 9.x | x86 | | HP/UX | 9.x - 11.x | HP9000 s700/s800 | | HP/UX | 9.x | HP9000 s300/s400 | | IBM AIX | 3.x - 5.x | IBM RS6000, ppc32, ppc64 | | Linux ELF | 1.x, 2.x | x86, x86_64, IA_64, ppc32, ppc64, arm32, arm64 | | macOS | 10.x – 11.x | ppc32, ppc64, x86, x86_64, arm64 | | Max/OS SVR4 | 1.x | Concurrent Maxion 9200 MP | | NCR SVR4 | 3.x | NCR 3435 | | OpenVMS | 6.x | DEC Alpha | | SCO OpenServer | 5.x | x86 | | SGI Irix SVR4 | 5.x, 6.x | IP12 MIPS, IP22 MIPS | | SunOS | 4.1.x | Sun Sparc | | Sun Solaris | 2.x | Sun Sparc, x86, x86_64 | | UnixWare SVR4.2 | 1.x, 2.x | x86 | | Windows NT | 4.x | x86 |

As the iODBC driver manager uses autoconf/automake/libtool, it should be portable to most modern UNIX-like OS out of the box. However, if you do need to make changes to the code or the configuration files, we would appreciate it if you would share your changes with the rest of the internet community by mailing your patches to iodbc@openlinksw.com, so we can include them for the next build.

Porting the iODBC driver manager to some non-UNIX-like operating systems, such as the Windows family (3.x, 95, NT, 200x, etc.), IBM OS/2, or Mac Classic, is supported, but has not been compiled or tested recently. Of course, you will need to supply a make/build file and a short LibMain for creating the iodbc.dll.

How to build the iODBC driver manager

Users of macOS should read the separate README_MACOSX document for more detail of porting to this platform.

Users of all other UNIX-like OS:

1. Run configure to adjust to target platform
2. Run make
3. Run make install

The configure program will examine your system for various compiler flags, system options, etc. In some cases, extra flags need to be added for the C compiler to work properly; for instance, on HP systems, you may need:

$ CFLAGS="-Ae -O" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local ..........

File Hierarchy

Note that the path of the system wide odbc.ini file is calculated as follows (based on flags to ./configure):

no --prefix                     default is /etc/odbc.ini
--prefix=/usr                   /etc/odbc.ini
--prefix=/xxx/yyy