Re: confused about *nix ODBC drivers

> I´ve been looking around to find the definitve, current,
> most-up-to-date, maintained, tried-and-tested ODBC driver for *nix, and
> I am rather confused: There is unixODBC, the iODBC manager and FreeODBC,
> the latter of which provides an ftp link to "the latest" PostgreSQL ODBC
> at ftp.informika.ru, which turns out to be dated from 1998. There is
> also an ODBC driver included with the sources.

iODBC is a driver manager; on Linux I use it to connect Applix to
PostgreSQL via the psqlODBC driver included with the PostgreSQL sources.

afaik unixODBC was a code fork done by whoever is pursuing the unixODBC
project; they have contributed patches back on occasion so perhaps there
is strong similarity with the psqlODBC driver (or perhaps not). Haven't
heard from those folks in a while.

"The latest driver", if frozen in 1998, is probably not worth pursuing.

> For the initial testing, I would be running the PostgreSQL server on the
> same box as the Real server, but eventually I would like to separate it
> so as to have a 2-tier (I think this would be called 2-tier, if the
> application is not on the same physical machine as the database server)
> setup. Openlinksw provides multi-tier ODBC drivers but they´re not free
> (actually quite expensive) as far as I could see. If I want to use
> iODBC, which driver do I need? Where is it? Does the free iODBC version
> support my (very simple) multi-tier setup? Can I use unixODBC for this?
> Would I use the same driver as for iODBC? Is 7.1 properly supported (I
> need 7.1 because of the TOASTed column support)?

I know that psqlODBC works through iODBC on Linux. Not sure about the
others. If you use unixODBC, let us know how it goes and I'll try
testing it with my setup.

Not sure what you mean by "properly supported". It is not released yet,
but most days the current code tree builds and passes the regression
tests, so should be suitable for code development. But ymmv, and flames
about occasional breakage go to /dev/null ;)

Good luck, and let us know how unixODBC looks.

Oh, and all the above was imho; others may have better info for you.

- Thomas