Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server on Linux

The Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server has been available for Linux for a while now, but I recently had a bit of trouble getting it to work with SQL Relay on CentOS 6.9. Just in case anyone else has had similar trouble, here's what I ran into, and here's how I fixed it.

The CentOS/RHEL 6 RPM's are available at https://packages.microsoft.com/rhel/6.8/prod/.

The driver itself is msodbcsql17-17.1.0.1-1.x86_64.rpm but if you try to install it using yum localinstall or rpm -i then it will complain that it needs a newer version of unixODBC than what is available for CentOS/RHEL 6. Version 2.3.1, in particular.

Fortunately, there are some unixODBC-2.3.1 rpms available in the same directory. Sort of...

Actually, there's a unixODBC-devel-2.3.1 rpm and some odd unixODBC-utf16 rpms, but the requested unixODBC-2.3.1 rpm is missing.

It turns out that a unixODBC-2.3.1 package was there at one point, but has since been removed. It's kind-of good that it was removed because it didn't always work. It worked with isql, but any calls to SQLConnect() by SQL Relay (and presumably by other apps) would reliably hang. What can we do though? The msodbcsql17 rpm requires unixODBC-2.3.1.

Well, those utf16 packages actually do work with msodbcsql17, and don't cause SQLConnect() to hang, but getting everything to install requires a little finesse.

I was able to get everything to install by running:

yum remove unixODBC unixODBC-devel
yum localinstall unixODBC-utf16-*
rpm -i --nodeps msodbcsql17-17.1.0.1-1.x86_64.rpm

The --nodeps option is important because it enables the rpm to install without checking dependencies.

After that I reconfigured, rebuild, and reinstalled SQL Relay and everything worked for me.

Updating Ubuntu 17.04

I recently attempted to apt-get upgrade an Ubuntu 17.04 VM that I hadn't upgraded in a while, and got all kinds of errors like:

N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.

It took me a surprising amount of time to discover the solution. Apparently this typically happens when a mirror has some problem that makes the updates unreadable, and I ran into lots of forums explaining how to fix that. Unfortunately, that wasn't my problem. My problem was a lot more legitimate.

Ubuntu 17.04 reached EOL in mid January of 2018, and so us.archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com don't host updates any longer.

Ha!

Well, the solution is simple. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace us.archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com with old-releases.ubuntu.com. Then rerun your apt-get update and apt-get upgrade again.

It guess I never ran into the problem before because other than 17.04, I'm only running LTS releases. 16.04 is still supported, and the other versions are so old that I had to make that change immediately after installation so apt-get update would work at all. I guess I never run into a case where it had been working and stopped.

You learn something new every day.