Installing the Client RPM on Red Hat and SUSE

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, you can download and install a client driver RPM that installs both the ODBC and JDBC driver libraries and the vsql client.

Vertica provides the FIPS-compliant client driver only as an rpm for 64-bit clients. You can install this rpm only on FIPS-enabled machines. The FIPS client includes vsql and ODBC drivers. If you are installing the FIPS-specific client, refer to the section, Installing the FIPS Client Driver for ODBC and vsql.

To install the client driver RPM package:

  1. Open a Web browser and log in to the myVertica portal.
  2. Click Downloads, and choose Client Drivers.

  3. Download the client RPM file that matches your client platform's architecture.

    The 64-bit client driver RPM installs both the 64-bit and 32-bit ODBC driver libraries on non-FIPS compliant systems.

  4. If you did not directly download the RPM on the client system, transfer the file to the client.
  5. Log in to the client system as root.

  6. Install the RPM package you downloaded:

    # rpm -Uvh package_name.rpm

You receive one or more conflict error messages if there are existing Vertica client driver files on your system. This can happen if you are trying to install the client driver package on a system that has the server package installed, since the server package also includes the client drivers. In this case, you don't need to install the client drivers, and can instead use the drivers installed by the server package. If the conflict arises from an old driver installation or from a server installation for an older version, you can use the rpm command's --force switch to force it to overwrite the existing files with the files in the client driver package.

Once you have installed the client package, you need to create a DSN (see Creating an ODBC DSN for Linux) and set some additional configuration parameters (see Required ODBC Driver Configuration Settings for Linux and UNIX) to use ODBC. To use JDBC, you need to modify your class path (see Modifying the Java CLASSPATH) before you can use JDBC.

You may also want to add the vsql client to your PATH environment variable so that you do not need to enter its full path to run it. You add it to your path by adding the following to the .profile file in your home directory or the global /etc/profile file:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/vertica/bin