Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver User Guide - Technical Reference

Technical Reference for the Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver

This section contains extra information relating to the deployment of the Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver.

Appendix Guide

ODBC Compliance

The Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver is an ODBC 3.5 driver and uses the driver manager to provide the deprecated and old ODBC 2 functions:

SQLBrowseConnect

SQLBulkOperations

SQLSetPos

Cursor support in the Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver is restricted to FORWARD_ONLY, as this is the only cursor type supported by Firebird. As a result, the Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver will work with ADO snapshots, but not with dynasets.

Multiple transactions on a single connection

Multiple transactions on a single connection are not supported by ODBC 3 and therefore cannot be supported by the Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver.

Firebird data types

The Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver supports all the Firebird data types that are available in the version of Firebird that you are connecting to.

InterBase data types

The Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver supports the DATE, TIME, TIMESTAMP and INT64 IB 6 data types.

Runtime SQL Dialect support

The required SQL Dialect can be set for a connection, but cannot be set at runtime, as it is not a statement level property.

Easysoft are considering adding this property in a future release.

Rollback Retaining

The Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver will support the isc_rollback_retaining function if it is present in a FBCLIENT.DLL or GDS32.DLL library.

Chili!soft

The Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver can be configured to work with Sun Chili!Soft ASP.Specific installation information is provided on the Easysoft web site

unixODBC

The Easysoft ODBC-Firebird Driver does not require a driver manager on the client machine, although there are some advantages in using one, such as:

There are currently two open source driver managers available for Unix, unixODBC and iODBC. If you want to use a driver manager then Easysoft recommend the unixODBC driver manager.

There are a number of reasons for this:

1.  The unixODBC project started by Peter Harvey is now maintained by Nick Gorham who is an Easysoft developer. This means there is much greater experience with unixODBC within Easysoft and we will be able to provide better support for the Firebird Driver running under unixODBC. It also means that if you find a problem in unixODBC it is much easier for us to facilitate a fix.

2.  Easysoft test all their ODBC drivers with unixODBC and although they may work with iODBC it is more difficult for us to support it as we are less familiar with it.

3.  The unixODBC package contains much more than a driver manager. The aim of the unixODBC project is to provide all the ODBC functionality available on Windows for UNIX operating systems. The unixODBC package may be built with the QT libraries to allow GUI configuration of DSNs and drivers. It also contains the GUI DataManager program which may be used to explore your ODBC data. the Firebird Driver contains the code and shared object which is used by unixODBC's GUI ODBCConfig utility to add/delete and configure Firebird DSNs.

4.  The Firebird Driver installation for UNIX automatically installs itself using the unixODBC installer program to run under unixODBC.

For the latest information about unixODBC, please refer to the unixODBC document in <InstallDir>/easysoft/fb/doc in case any of the information here has been superseded.


REF

For more information on unixODBC see http://www.unixodbc.org.