How to install freetds in Linux?

Question

I am trying to connect to MSSQL server from Ubuntu. I have installed freetds like suggested here.

However, when I try to configure /etc/odbc.ini and enter a driver path I have no driver at location /usr/local/freetds/lib/libtdsodbc.so.

Can someone help me to install freetds and to configure odbc to use it? *edit1: I have found libtdsodbc.so in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc. Should I use that driver/path?

Answer 1

I've created a Vagrant box which has a full installation example here: https://github.com/FlipperPA/django-python3-vagrant/

...but here are the basic steps.

# Install pre-requesite packages sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev freetds-dev freetds-bin tdsodbc 

Point odbcinst.ini to the driver in /etc/odbcinst.ini:

[FreeTDS] Description = v0.91 with protocol v7.2 Driver = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/libtdsodbc.so 

Create your DSNs in odbc.ini:

[dbserverdsn] Driver = FreeTDS Server = dbserver.domain.com Port = 1433 TDS_Version = 7.2 

...and your DSNs in freetds.conf:

[global]     # TDS protocol version, use:     # 7.3 for SQL Server 2008 or greater (tested through 2014)     # 7.2 for SQL Server 2005     # 7.1 for SQL Server 2000     # 7.0 for SQL Server 7     tds version = 7.2     port = 1433      # Whether to write a TDSDUMP file for diagnostic purposes     # (setting this to /tmp is insecure on a multi-user system) ;   dump file = /tmp/freetds.log ;   debug flags = 0xffff      # Command and connection timeouts ;   timeout = 10 ;   connect timeout = 10      # If you get out-of-memory errors, it may mean that your client     # is trying to allocate a huge buffer for a TEXT field.       # Try setting 'text size' to a more reasonable limit      text size = 64512  # A typical Microsoft server [dbserverdsn]     host = dbserver.domain.com     port = 1433     tds version = 7.2 

After completing this, you can test your connection by attempting to connect with tsql (to test the FreeTDS layer) and isql (for the unixODBC through FreeTDS stack).

Answer 2

The version available via apt-get is a really old version. To get a newer version:

sudo apt-get install wget sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install libc6-dev  # find latest version of FreeTDS ftp://ftp.freetds.org/pub/freetds/stable/  wget ftp://ftp.freetds.org/pub/freetds/stable/freetds-1.2.tar.gz tar -xzf freetds-1.2.tar.gz cd freetds-1.2 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-tdsver=7.3 sudo make sudo make install