# Open Database Connectivity

An ODBC engine needs drivers to be able to interact with databases.

## ODBC engines

You have two options to chose from. Apparently unixODBC is more widely supported.

### unixODBC

#### Installation

    # pacman -S unixodbc

#### Configuration

At /etc/odbcinst.ini is where drivers are declared, and /etc/odbc.ini where connections. More instruction at each driver section.

### iODBC

...

## Drivers

### FreeTDS

FreeTDS is a set of libraries for Unix and Linux that allows your programs to natively talk to Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase databases. Technically speaking, FreeTDS is an open source implementation of the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol used by these databases for their own clients.

#### Installation

    pacman -S freetds

#### Configuration

/etc/odbcinst.ini

    [FreeTDS]
    Driver          = /usr/lib/libtdsodbc.so
    UsageCount      = 1

## Databases

### Microsoft SQL Server 2000

/etc/odbc.ini

    [server_name]
    Driver      = FreeTDS
    #Trace       = Yes
    #TraceFile   = /tmp/odbc
    Servername  = server_name
    Database    = database_name

/etc/freetds/freetds.conf

    [server_name]
    host = 192.168.0.2 # Host name or IP address.
    port = 1433 # Default port.
    tds version = 7.1
    client charset = UTF-8

Category:

- Database management systems