Installation guide

4. Accessing Popular Databases

Actual Technologies Mac OS X ODBC Driver for PostgreSQL

Homepage: http://www.actualtech.com/

When using the driver on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), be sure to use version

3.0.9 or higher, since earlier versions had a problem with fetching data.

4.7 MySQL

4.7.1 Available ODBC Drivers

MySQL ODBC Driver

Homepage: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/

Tested with MySQL ODBC driver 5.2.6 and MySQL 5.5 and 5.6.

Be sure to use the mxODBC ODBC manager subpackage against which the

MySQL driver was compiled. This will usually be

mx.ODBC.unixODBC or

mx.ODBC.iODBC.

The MySQL ODBC driver documentation recommends using unixODBC with the

driver, i.e. the

mx.ODBC.unixODBC subpackage.

Note that the MySQL 5.2 ODBC driver can connect to all recent versions of the

MySQL database server. It is usually best to use the latest available version, even if

your database server has a different version number.

Driver Notes

• There is one particularity with the ODBC driver for MySQL: all input

parameters are being processed as strings -- even integers and floats. The

ODBC driver implements the necessary conversions. mxODBC therefore

defaults to Python Type binding mode for binding parameters; see the

Python Type Input Binding

section 8.4 for more details.

• Unicode data is supported, provided you use the Unicode ODBC driver

versions - on Unix these are identified with a small "w" at the end of the

driver lib name, e.g. libmyodbc5w.so. It works best with the

NATIVE_UNICODE_STRINGFORMAT mode. You can also use the auto-

transcoding feature of mxODBC with UTF-8 as encoding.

• Using a MySQL 5 Windows ODBC driver character setting of

'utf-8'

(with hyphen) can cause the driver to segfaults, so care must be taken,

using the right spelling for the character set setting.