FreeTDS ODBC for SQL Server

Configure the FreeTDS ODBC data source that will be used in the ODI "source" connection parameter:

Software requirements

When using the FTM database driver, the FreeTDS driver must be installed, see www.freetds.org.

Minimum required FreeTDS version is 1.00.104

With the FTM driver, there is no need to install a driver manager like unixODBC: The FTM database driver is linked directly with the libtdsodbc.so shared library. Verify the environment variable (LD_LIBRARY_PATH or equivalent) specifies the search path for that database client shared library.

Make sure the FreeTDS environment variables are properly set. Check for example FREETDS (the path to the configuration file).

Specific ODBC settings

Create the odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini files, to define the data source parameters.

The ODBCINI environment variable must point to the odbc.ini file, and ODBCINST environment variable must point to the odbcinst.ini files.

Set the TDS protocol version depending on the SQL Server version, by setting the tds version parameter in freetds.conf or TDS_Version in odbc.ini. For example, for SQL Server version 2012 and 2014, use TDS_Version=7.3. For more details, see the FreeTDS documentation.

Client locale settings

Define the client character set for FreeTDS (client charset parameter in freetds.conf or ClientCharset parameter in odbc.ini). You may need to link FreeTDS with the libiconv library to support character set conversions.

On both Linux and Windows, ODBC character string bindings is controlled by the widechar option, which is automatically selected according to the application locale and length semantics. For more details see CHAR and VARCHAR data types.

FreeTDS ODBC data source example

Unix ODBCINI sample for FreeTDS driver:

[ftm_msvtest1_ida_utf8_2017]
Description     = SQL Server 2017
Server          = ida
Database        = msvtest1
Port            = 1433
TDS_Version     = 7.3
ClientCharset   = UTF-8
#dump_file = /tmp/freetds.log
#dump_file_append = yes

With the above ODBC data source definition, the ODI "source" parameter needs to be defined as follows:

dbi.database.dbname.source = "ftm_msvtest1_ida_utf8_2017"