AIX TM1 9.5 connecting via ODBC

[MarioRubbo]

I am mostly familiar with Windows installs of TM1 but I've been tasked with a UNIX install. Some documentation mentions installing a TM1 component called the "ODBC Gateway" but our UNIX console-based installation program only listed the AdminServer and Server as installable components. I did not see any component called the ODBC Gateway. Is this a component that was required in previous releases but has disappeared in more recent releases? Has anyone installed AIX 5.3 TM1 9.5 and tried to connect to databases via ODBC?

[MarioRubbo]

As per Support, the TM1 ODBC Gateway component is gone. Current releases require a setting in the TM1S.CFG file called "ODBCLibraryPath" that points to a particular ODBC UNIX ".so" driver file.

e.g. ODBCLibraryPath=/optware/sybase/lib/libdbodbc9.so

Also, there is an odbc_test.exe program in the TM1 "bin" directory that can be used to test TM1 connectivity with ODBC. Also, make sure that your ODBC driver architecture matches the TM1 architecture: i.e. 32bit TM1 requires 32bit ODBC drivers, 64bit TM1 requires 64bit ODBC driver. The architecture is dependent on the version of TM1 - not on the version of the RDBMS software, i.e. 32bit Oracle server would still need a 64bit client driver on the TM1 machine if 64bit TM1 is installed.

[MarioRubbo]

After several more weeks of struggling, I've finally gotten 64bit AIX TM1 9.5 to connect to my Sybase IQ database. Success required the installation of a 64bit Sybase IQ ODBC driver provided by Sybase. Also, TM1 requires that a 64bit ODBC Driver Manager be installed. The Sybase install came with a file called libodbc.so but this was not a full implementation of a ODBC Driver Manager. TM1 required a full implementation so we downloaded a package called unixODBC for this. This package included a file called libodbc.a which is the Driver Manager in an archived file format. The .a format is incompatible with TM1 so I needed to use the following command to extract a .so file from the archive: ar -x -X 64 libodbc.a". This create a file called libodbc.so.1 which will be used by TM1.

The complete steps are:
- to modify the tm1s.cfg file to point to the libodbc.so.1 file. In my case: /optware/easysoft/unixODBC/lib/libodbc.so.1
- unixODBC software (64bit driver manager) is configured to point to the Sybase driver file
- The appropriate Sybase driver (64bit driver) is loaded and used to connect.

[kcostigan]

Mario,
I am also trying to configure the Driver Manager software package called unixODBC because I encountered the same requirements of driver manager software for TM1. The problem I am having is with the archive command you specified:
ar -x -X64 libodbc.a
I receive no output from this and it does not create the file called "libodbc.so.1". However, if I run it by omitting the X64 option it does work and creates a libodbc.so.1 file. This leads me to believe that the version of "libodbc.a" is possibly not 64bit. When I downloaded the unixODBC software from the website there was no differentiation between 32 and 64 bit versions. I compiled it with the standard AIX xlc v9 compiler.
Can you think of anything I may have done wrong...did you encounter any similar problem?

Ken

[MarioRubbo]

The choice of 32-bit vs 64-bit is driven by your TM1 installation. If TM1 is 32-bit, then you need 32-bit unixODBC Driver Manager and a 32-bit ODBC database driver. This is regardless of the actual database architecture (32-bit vs 64-bit). In my case, TM1 was 64-bit so I had to get 64-bit drivers AND a 64-bit driver manager. The compiling part was done by someone else so I can't help you there. You can use the UNIX "file" command to determine if the libodbc.so.1 file is 32-bit or 64-bit.