System Requirements

ODBC Connector can be installed as part of a larger system that includes an IDOL Server and an interface for the information stored in IDOL Server. To maximize performance, OpenText recommends that you install IDOL Server and the connector on different machines.

The connector can be installed on any computer provided it can communicate with the database through ODBC.

For information about the minimum system requirements required to run IDOL components, including ODBC Connector, refer to the IDOL Getting Started Guide.

Prerequisites

To retrieve information through ODBC you must install an ODBC driver for the database that you want to retrieve data from. If you are installing the connector on Linux you must install the unixODBC driver manager, and configure the name and path of your ODBC driver in the unixODBC odbcinst.ini configuration file. This file is usually located at /etc/odbcinst.ini.

To connect to the database using a Data Source Name (DSN) rather than a full connection string, you must configure a DSN. On Windows, you can do this through the 64-bit ODBC Data Sources administration utility (Windows Control Panel > Administrative Tools > ODBC Data Sources 64-bit). On Linux, define a DSN in the unixODBC odbc.ini configuration file. This file is usually located at /etc/odbc.ini.

TIP: On Linux, you can use the environment variable ODBCSYSINI to set the path of the directory that contains both odbcinst.ini and odbc.ini.

TIP: The ODBC driver, unixODBC (if applicable), and the DSN should be installed or configured on the machine that hosts the connector, not on the database server.

The following example shows ODBC drivers configured in odbcinst.ini.

[PostgreSQL]
Driver=/usr/pgsql-11/lib/psqlodbcw.so

[MySQL ODBC 8.0 Unicode Driver]
Driver=/usr/lib64/libmyodbc8w.so

The following example shows a DSN configured in odbc.ini. The name of the DSN is MyDSN. Notice that the driver name matches one of the entries in odbcinst.ini.

[MyDSN]
Driver=PostgreSQL
ServerName=server.example.com
Port=5432
UserName=connector
Password=password
Database=db123

Setting the user name and password in the DSN is optional, because you can specify these in the connection string (in the connector configuration file) instead.