yeah, it is all odbc, all the time here, it seems. that is just because i can’t write about the really exciting stuff. soon!

that is not to say that releasing mysql connector/odbc 5.1.3-rc is not a huge milestone! it took us a while to get there, but we finally have a unicode-aware odbc driver that is, in our opinions, production-ready. now we just need some community feedback to find out if we are right. there are a few minor issues we know about already, but the impact of those is generally small enough that the majority of folks should not have any problems.

yeah, it is all odbc, all the time here, it seems. that is just because i can’t write about the really exciting stuff. soon!

that is not to say that releasing mysql connector/odbc 5.1.3-rc is not a huge milestone! it took us a while to get there, but we finally have a unicode-aware odbc driver that is, in our opinions, production-ready. now we just need some community feedback to find out if we are right. there are a few minor issues we know about already, but the impact of those is generally small enough that the majority of folks should not have any problems.

the march of progress continues, with the release of mysql connector/odbc 3.51.24. we are down to 33 bugs, most of which will not get fixed further 3.51 releases, but will be fixed in 5.1 or later. i think the two remaining issues we might fix in 3.51 are the crashes of the setup library on mac os x (which may just require a 10.5 build) and bug #12805.

working with the iodbc driver manager on mac os x has been a frustration on two fronts.

first, the installer api functions provided by iodbc constantly set the configuration mode to ODBC_BOTH_DSN, which means you have to keep resetting it to the correct value after nearly every installer api call. this problem is platform-agnostic — the iodbc code is just plain wrong.

second, when called from the odbc administrator application on mac os x, any failures that the driver reports or passes through from the installer api in registering the driver are ignored, and the application instead uses a generic prompt for dsn configuration.

so even with the first problem fixed, the second problem has led to a lot of tail-chasing until i discovered that the odbc administrator application only obtains enough privileges to write to /Library/ODBC as …

connector/odbc 5.1.2 was released today. this will probably be the last beta. we have gone back and triaged all of the bugs filed against connector/odbc, and have identified a few bugs that we have to fix before we will release a release candidate, but overall the trend of bugs is very encouraging. there are only a handful of bugs filed specifically against 5.1, and the total number of connector/odbc bugs is down to under 60.

while we start to wind up development of connector/odbc 5.1, i will also be taking on responsibility for libmysql, the c library that defines the client interface to mysql, and the mysql command-line utilities. there are about 120 active bugs in those areas right now, so the first task will be getting that down to a more manageable number.

after that, the field will open up for new development. i know that an asynchronous interface to libmysql is on some people’s wishlist, and there are other areas where i think that libmysql could be cleaned up in general.

but the idea that i think is the most exciting is to build a scripting …

I built a simple ODBC program that attempts to connect to a data source and tells you whether the connection succeeded or not.

It works. Yay. I also moved the example config directory to the example directory, since that's what they are.

$ dltest /opt/sdb/programs/lib/libsqlod.so SQLAllocHandle
[dltest] ERROR dlopen: /opt/sdb/programs/lib/libsqlod.so: undefined symbol: _ZTVN10__cxxabiv120__si_class_type_infoE

$ LD_PRELOAD=libstdc++.so.5 dltest /opt/sdb/programs/lib/libsqlod.so SQLAllocHandle

I put this example odbcinst.ini file in /etc, and this example odbc.ini file in my home directory as $HOME/.odbc.ini, and then ran the following:

$ LD_PRELOAD=libstdc++.so.5 isql MailDB dba dba

and voìla! Now to get down to the important bits...