Hello, all
Having found no section devoted to ODBC in general, I
consulted at "Where is the forum for..." and decided to post
my question here.
Is an ODBC provider required to use the
SQLGetPrivateProfileString function to acquire the
connection parameters, or may it locate and read the
odbc.ini file directly?
The documentation for SQLGetPrivateProfileString describes
what it does but is silent as to whether it is the only
legal way for a driver to read its DSN information:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/odbc/reference/syntax/sqlgetprivateprofilestring-function
It says that:
Calls to GetPrivateProfileString that retrieve a profile
string from the Odbc.ini file should be replaced with
calls to SQLGetPrivateProfileString.
Does the `should' indicate a recommendation rather than a
requirement? Am I asking this because I am having a problem
the SAP HANA ODBC driver for Linux, which does not use
SQLGetPrivateProfileString and reads odbc.ini directly. The
unixODBC driver manager, however, stores odbc.ini in a
directly that the HANA driver does not search, so they don't
work well together without such dirty tricks as having an
extra copy of, or a symbolic link to, odbc.ini where the
HANA driver expects to find it. Antoher work-around is via
the ODBCINI enviroment variable, which both driver manager
and driver respect, but I prefer the to follow the standard.
Since it is precisely the problem that
SQLGetPrivateProfileString is intended to solve, I have
reported it as bug in the driver, which SAP support refuse
to acknowldge, on the ground that, to avoid dependency on
unixODBC, their driver cannot link with any installer DLL.
Whereas my understanding is that such a link introduces no
such dependency, but only a contract enforced by the ODBC
standard, because the installer DLL is specifed to be
`odbcinst', which corresponds to libodbcinst.so on Unix, and
must implement the installer DLL API:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/odbc/reference/syntax/installer-dll-api-reference-function
It may come from any vendor (unixODBC, iODBC, HANA,
Microsoft...), and if its name differs from the standard
one, a symbolic link should be created.
Am I right or SAP support?
Anton Shepelev via Community Forums NNTP Bridge
