Client Drivers

You must install the Vertica client drivers to access Vertica from your client application. The drivers create and maintain connections to the database and provide APIs that your applications use to access your data. The client drivers support connections using JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET.

Client Driver Standards

The client drivers support the following standards:

• ODBC drivers conform to ODBC 3.5.1 specifications.
• JDBC drivers conform to JDK 5 specifications.
• ADO.NET drivers conform to .NET framework 3.0 specifications.

Installing the Client Drivers

How you install client drivers depends on the client's operating system:

• For Linux and UNIX clients, you must first install a Linux driver manager. After you have installed the driver manager, there are two different ways to install the client drivers:

  • On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 64-bit and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10/11 64-bit, you can use the Vertica client RPM package to install the ODBC and JDBC drivers as well as the vsql client.
  • On other Linux platforms and UNIX-like platforms you can download the ODBC and JDBC drivers and install them individually.

  Note: The ODBC and JDBC client drivers are installed by the server .rpm files. If you have installed Vertica Analytics Platform 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, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX). 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.)

• On Mac OS X clients, download the ODBC client driver .pkg file. The driver is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.
• On Windows clients, download the 32-bit or 64-bit client installer. The installer provides the ODBC client driver, the ADO.NET client driver, the OLE DB client driver, the vsql client, the Microsoft Connectivity Pack, and the Visual Studio plug-in.
• There is a cross-platform JDBC client driver .jar file available for installation on all platforms.

The remainder of this section explain the requirements for the Vertica client drivers, and the procedure for downloading, installing, and configuring them.