Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for ODBC Linux and macOS

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The following are answers to questions about the ODBC Driver for SQL Server on Linux and macOS.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do existing ODBC applications on Linux or macOS work with the driver?
You should be able to compile and run the ODBC applications that you have been compiling and running on Linux or macOS using other drivers.

Which features of SQL Server 2012 (11.x) does this version of the driver support?

The ODBC driver on Linux and macOS supports all server features in SQL Server 2012 (11.x) except LocalDB. For more information about SQL Server supported features, see Programming Guidelines.

Does the driver support Kerberos authentication?
Yes. If you have an existing Kerberos environment setup, you should be able to connect to servers using the Trusted_Connection=Yes DSN or connection string option. For more information, see Using Integrated Authentication.

Which Unicode encoding should an application use?
UTF-8 for SQL_CHAR data and UTF-16 for SQL_WCHAR data. Depending on the system locale and driver version, non-UTF-8 data in one of several encodings may also be supported. For more information, see Programming Guidelines.

Are there ODBC samples that I can download and run with the driver to experiment with or evaluate it?

See Use Existing MSDN C++ ODBC Samples for the ODBC Driver on Linux for a sample. This is also applicable to the macOS ODBC driver.

Is the ODBC driver on Linux or macOS open source?

No, the ODBC drivers on Linux and macOS are not an open source product.

See Also