Setting up ODBC on CentOS 5.2

Pre-requisites

unixODBC needs libstc++.so.5 and libtdl.so.3, which can be easily installed using

$ yum install compat-libstdc++-33.i386 libtool-ltdl.i386 libX11 libXcursor libXext

Next, we need to install unixODBC:

$ yum install unixODBC

Then we need the ODBC Driver and Setup Library (both generic RPM version), which can be downloaded on the MySQL website.

There's a newer version 5.1 of the ODBC connector on the site, but it will not work on CentOS 5.2!

Once they are downloaded in a directory, install both using

$ rpm -Uhv *.rpm

Ok, that's the installation part. Now let's go to the configuration.

Configuration files

/etc/odbcinst.ini

[MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver]
DRIVER          = /usr/lib/libmyodbc3.so
SETUP           = /usr/lib/libmyodbc3S.so
UsageCount              = 1

Delete everything else, especially if there are other driver sections referring to MySQL. They will not work anyway.

/etc/odbc.ini

This file defines your DSNs. Let's take this example:

[mydsn]
Description = emma database on devel2
Driver = /usr/lib/libmyodbc3.so
Server = 172.20.8.141
Database = mydb
Port = 3306
Option = 3
User = yournamehere
Password = yourpasswordhere

Installing Driver/DSN

Now we are ready to install the driver and DSN (in this order):

$ odbcinst -i -d -f /etc/odbcinst.ini
$ odbcinst -i -s -l -f /etc/odbc.ini

For clients, which cannot use system DSNs and need user-level DSNs, execute this as the user:

$ odbcinst -i -s -h -f /etc/odbc.ini

Note the h (User) instead of l (System) switch! Couldn't be more obvious, right?

Let's check if your data source is listed now:

$ odbcinst -s -q

If so, well done! ODBC is running.

You can now connect using the isql tool, where you can issue SQL statements just like with the mysql client:

isql mydsn

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