Installing ODBC Drivers on Linux

Read Driver Prerequisites before you proceed.

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

The ODBC and JDBC client drivers are installed by the server .rpm files. If you have installed Vertica on your Linux system for development or testing purposes, you do not need to download and install the client drivers on it—you just need to configure the drivers. To use ODBC, you need to create a DSN (see Creating an ODBC DSN for Linux). To use JDBC, you need to add the JDBC client driver to the Java CLASSPATH (see Modifying the Java CLASSPATH). (The JDBC client driver is not available on FIPS-compliant systems.)

For details, see Vertica 10.0.x Supported Platforms.

The ODBC driver installation packages are broken down by client platform on the myVertica portal. The package's filename is named based on its operating system and architecture (for example, vertica_10.0..xx_odbc_x86_64_linux.tar.gz)

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.

Installation Procedure

  1. Open a Web browser and log in to myVertica portal.
  2. Click the Download tab and locate and download the driver package that corresponds to your client system.
  3. If you did not directly download to the client system, transfer the downloaded file to it.
  4. Log in to the client system as root.
  5. If the directory /opt/vertica/ does not exist, create it:

    # mkdir -p /opt/vertica/
  6. Copy the downloaded file to the /opt/vertica/ directory. For example:

    # cp vertica_10.0..xx_odbc_x86_64_linux.tar.gz /opt/vertica/ 
  7. Change to the /opt/vertica/ directory:

    # cd /opt/vertica/
  8. Uncompress the file you downloaded. For example:

    $ tar vzxf vertica_10.0..xx_odbc_x86_64_linux.tar.gz

    Two folders are created: one for the include file, and one for the library files. The path of the library file depends on the processor architecture: lib for 32-bit libraries, and lib64 for 64-bit libraries. So, a 64-bit driver client download creates the directories:

    • /opt/vertica/include, which contains the header file
    • /opt/vertica/lib64, which contains the library file

Post Driver Installation Configuration

You must configure the ODBC driver before you can use it. There are two required configuration files:

If you are upgrading your ODBC driver, you must either update your DSNs to point to the newly-installed driver or create new DSNs. If your odbc.ini file references drivers defined in an odbcinst.ini file, you just need to update the odbcinst.ini file. See Creating an ODBC Data Source Name (DSN) for details.