ODBC (Mike OShea)

[Fairlight]

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> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006, ryan at bulldogsoftware.com wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 02:04:52PM -0500, O'Shea, Michael (LABS) said:
> >
> >
> >> How do I configure my Filepro Unix Application to use ODBC and
> >> "READ/WRITE" Oracle Tables?  As I was told by fptech, that this cannot
> >> be done and that this isn't even in the plans for unix.
> >>
> >> I'm looking for this to be a "CLIENT" of the oracle table.
> >
> >Well there are a few things that you need to do.
> >
> >1. get filePro ODBC 2. add an fp_id field to your Oracle table 3. in
> >filePro create a new ODBC type filePro file and attach it to the Oracle
> >datasource.
> >
> >So perhaps what fP meant by "cannot be done" is that you cannot do this
> >on Unix.
>
> I have never used FP's ODBC, but assume that it has to be pretty much the
> same as OpenOffice.org's in that it requires the unixodbc program, *AND*
> the appropriate odbc libraries to connect to the target system (Oracle in
> this case).

Erm.  I think there's confusion.  I know I detected confusion in the OP's
question and details, but it's propogating.

fPODBC is Windows-only.  The only thing you'd have on unix would be a
server of some other flavour (say, Oracle).  But you can't use fPODBC on
*nix at all, even as a client, as it's Windows-only.

I've used unixodbc myself in concert with DBI::ODBC in perl.  You still are
missing that layer in the *nix version, for which there is no ODBC.

> As I understand ODBC, it's basically a shim that translates the client's
> database requests into SQL that the target database understands.  This is
> also basically how the perl DBI and python database abstraction layers
> work.

Yeah, more or less.  Except when I was talking to MSSQL, it was:
     DBI <-> DBI::ODBC <-> UnixODBC <-> MSSQL

You could put UnixODBC on a system, but there's no *nix-based filePro
version that takes the part of DBI::ODBC.  That's a bit of a problem.

To the best of my knowledge, fPODBC is not only client-only, but
Windows-only, so any use of it on *nix is straight out.  And someone please
correct me if I'm wrong.  (As if I have to ask.  *grin*)

mark->