ODBC-Based Development

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a Microsoft API for accessing databases based on the X/OPEN CLI. The ODBC API alleviates applications from directly operating in databases, and enhances the database portability, extensibility, and maintainability.

Figure 1 shows the system structure of ODBC.

Figure 1 ODBC system structure
Click to enlarge

GaussDB(DWS) supports ODBC 3.5 in the following environments.

**Table 1** OSs Supported by ODBC
OS	Platform
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1/SP2/SP3/SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and SP1/SP2/SP3/SP5	x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4/6.5/6.6/6.7/6.8/6.9/7.0/7.1/7.2/7.3/7.4/7.5	x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5	ARM64
CentOS 6.4/6.5/6.6/6.7/6.8/6.9/7.0/7.1/7.2/7.3/7.4	x86_64
CentOS 7.6	ARM64
EulerOS 2.0 SP2/SP3	x86_64
EulerOS 2.0 SP8	ARM64
NeoKylin 7.5/7.6	ARM64
Oracle Linux R7U4	x86_64
Windows 7	32-bit
Windows 7	64-bit
Windows Server 2008	32-bit
Windows Server 2008	64-bit

The operating systems listed above refer to the operating systems on which the ODBC program runs. They can be different from the operating systems where databases are deployed.

The ODBC Driver Manager running on UNIX or Linux can be unixODBC or iODBC. Select unixODBC-2.3.0 here as the component for connecting the database.

Windows has a native ODBC Driver Manager. You can locate Data Sources (ODBC) by choosing Control Panel > Administrative Tools.

The current database ODBC driver is based on an open source version and may be incompatible with GaussDB(DWS) data types, such as tinyint, smalldatetime, and nvarchar2.