This topic explains how to set up client access to DB2® databases for ODBC applications
in Linux and UNIX operating systems. If your application
is a CLI application,
you are only required to perform the task in the Before you begin section
to set up your environment.
Before you begin
Before setting up the ODBC environment, ensure you have set
up the CLI environment.
Procedure
For ODBC applications on UNIX that
need to access a DB2 database,
perform the following steps:
- Ensure that an ODBC driver manager is installed and that
each user that will use ODBC has access to it. DB2 does not install an ODBC driver manager,
so you must use the ODBC driver manager that was supplied with your
ODBC client application or ODBC SDK in order to access DB2 data using that application.
- Set up .odbc.ini, the end-user's data
source configuration. Each user ID has a separate copy of this file
in their home directory. Note that the file starts with a dot. Although
necessary files are usually updated automatically by the tools on
most platforms, users of ODBC on UNIX platforms
will have to edit them manually.
Using an ASCII editor,
update the file to reflect the appropriate data source configuration
information. To register a DB2 database
as an ODBC data source there must be one stanza (section) for each DB2 database.
The
.odbc.ini file
must contain the following lines (examples refer to configuration
of the SAMPLE database data source):
- Ensure that the application execution environment has reference
to the ODBC driver manager by including the corresponding shared library
in the environment variable for the library path. The following table
indicates the library name by operating system
Operating system |
Environment variable |
Library name |
AIX |
LIBPATH |
libodbc.a |
HP-UX, Linux, and
Solaris |
LD_LIBRARY_PATH |
libodbc.so |
- Enable a system-wide .odbc.ini file to
be used by setting the ODBCINI environment variable
to the fully qualified pathname of the .ini file. Some ODBC driver
managers support this feature which allows for centralized control.
The following examples show how to set ODBCINI:
in the C shell,
setenv ODBCINI /opt/odbc/system_odbc.ini
in
the Bourne or Korn shell,
ODBCINI=/opt/odbc/system_odbc.ini;export ODBCINI
- Once the .odbc.ini file is set up, you
can run your ODBC application and access DB2 databases.
Refer to the documentation that comes with your ODBC application for
additional help and information.