-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 566
Connecting to SQL Server from Mac OSX
The following instructions assume you already have a SQL Server database running somewhere that your Mac has network access to. Just FYI, Microsoft's instructions for installing the latest drivers are here.
The connection to SQL Server will be made using the unixODBC driver manager and the FreeTDS driver. Installing them is most easily done using homebrew, the Mac package manager:
brew update
brew install unixodbc freetds
Ensure the freetds.conf file is located in directory /usr/local/etc/, which will be a symlink to the actual file as installed by Homebrew. Check the specific location of the freetds.conf file by running tsql -C. The default file already contains a standard example configuration, but all you need to do is add your server information to the end, as follows:
[MYMSSQL]
host = mssqlhost.xyz.com
port = 1433
tds version = 7.3
There are other key/value pairs that can be added but this shouldn't usually be necessary, see here for details. The host parameter should be either the network name (or IP address) of the database server, or "localhost" if SQL Server is running directly on your Mac (e.g. using Docker). A TDS version of 7.3 should be OK for SQL Server 2008 and newer, but bear in mind you might need a different value for older versions of SQL Server. For more information on TDS protocol versions see Choosing a TDS protocol version. Do not use TDS versions 8.0 or 9.0 though. Oddly, they are not newer than version 7.4. They are actually obsolete aliases for older TDS versions and their use is discouraged.
Test the connection using the tsql utility, e.g. tsql -S MYMSSQL -U myuser -P mypassword. If this works, you should see the following:
locale is "en_US.UTF-8"
locale charset is "UTF-8"
using default charset "UTF-8"
1>
At this point you can run SQL queries, e.g. "SELECT @@VERSION" but you'll need to enter "GO" on a separate line to actually execute the query. Type exit to get out of the interactive session.
Run odbcinst -j to get the location of the odbcinst.ini and odbc.ini files (probably in the directory /usr/local/etc/). Edit odbcinst.ini to include the following:
[FreeTDS]
Description=FreeTDS Driver for Linux & MSSQL
Driver=/usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
Setup=/usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
UsageCount=1
Edit odbc.ini to include the following:
[MYMSSQL]
Description = Test to SQLServer
Driver = FreeTDS
Servername = MYMSSQL
Note, the "Driver" is the name of the entry in odbcinst.ini, and the "Servername" is the name of the entry in freetds.conf (not a network name). There are other key/value pairs that can be included, see here for details.
Check that all is OK by running isql MYMSSQL myuser mypassword. You should see the following:
+---------------------------------------+
| Connected! |
| |
| sql-statement |
| help [tablename] |
| quit |
| |
+---------------------------------------+
You can enter SQL queries at this point if you like. Type quit to exit the interactive session.
It should now be possible to connect to your SQL Server database using pyodbc, for example:
import pyodbc
# the DSN value should be the name of the entry in odbc.ini, not freetds.conf
conn = pyodbc.connect('DSN=MYMSSQL;UID=myuser;PWD=mypassword')
crsr = conn.cursor()
rows = crsr.execute("select @@VERSION").fetchall()
print(rows)
crsr.close()
conn.close()
If you don't want to define a DSN in odbc.ini, you can reference the driver entry you added to odbcinst.ini.
E.g.:
cnx = pyodbc.connect(
server="my-server.com",
database="mydb",
user='myuser',
tds_version='7.4',
password="mypassword",
port=1433,
driver='FreeTDS'
)
Note: in this case you may need to specify all necessary TDS parameters in `pyodbc.connect`.
#### Connecting without modifying `odbcinst.ini` or `odbc.ini`
If you want to avoid modifying both `odbc.ini` and `odbcinst.ini`, you can just specify the driver file location in the `driver` param in `pyodbc.connect`.
E.g.:
cnx = pyodbc.connect( server="my-server.com", database="mydb", user='myuser', tds_version='7.4', password="mypassword", port=1433, driver='/usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so' )