How to avoid storing userid/password in the .odbc.ini file on Linux?

Question

I am connecting to a Teradata database through ODBC with Stata on an Ubuntu server (12.04 LTS). Everything works fine, except that I have my TD userid and password stored in the .odbc.ini file, which seems like a terrible idea. The alternative is to enter them in Stata, which seems even worse and is awkward. Is there a way to do this more securely? The login info that I use to ssh into the server is synced with the TD database. It seems that it should be possible to pass that information along.

Answer 1

In ODBC terms you do not need to store usernames / passwords in any of your ODBC ini files. Both the ODBC SQLConnect and SQLDriverConnect support the passing in of username / password at the time they are called.

SQLDriverConnect would need something in your InConnectionString like "DSN=YourDataSourceName;UID=username;PWD=password".

You could go one step further and pass in the whole DSN as a command line argument thus meaning that you would not need an ODBC data source in an ini file. I'm sure one of the forum readers can post a sample for you from Teradata.

As for passing in the user name and password from your SSH loging. Your application would need to capture that and pass it to ODBC.