Connecting to an SQL Server database from Altair SLC on Linux

IanBD

If you have data stored in a SQL Server database, you can connect using the Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server. To install the client you need to:

1. Download the Microsoft configuration repository using the following commands:

   sudo -i 
   curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/linux-distribution/version/prod.repo > /etc/yum.repos.d/msprod.repo
   exit

   Where linux-distribution is the absolute path to the download location, and version is the version of the Linux distribution; for example a Red Hat Enterprise 7 system would write /rhel/7/.

2. Install the mssql-tools package and its dependencies using the following command:

   sudo yum install mssql-tools

   You are prompted to accept the size of the installation and the licence terms.
   Enter YES or y where required.

3. Include the data source name (DSN) information in the ODBC files. The unixODBC installation adds the files /etc/odbc.ini and /etc/odbcinst.ini to your system, if the files do not exist.
   • The odbcinst.ini file should already contain DSN information.
     Edit the file and change the driver name to SQL Server.
   • Add the following lines to /etc/odbc.ini:

     [SQL Server]
     Server=server-name[, port-number]
     Driver=/opt/microsoft/msodbcsql-version/lib64/libmsodbcsql-version
     Description=My SQL Server ODBC Driver

     Where you replace server-name and, if required, port-number with your corresponding server credentials. Replace msodbcsql-version with your version of msodbcsql and libmsodbcsql-version with your version of the libmsodbcsql shared object file.

Once the client has been installed, you can test the connection using the following SAS language program:

LIBNAME DATASRC SQLSVR USER=user-name PASSWORD=password
        SERVER=server-id DATABASE=dbase;
PROC DATASETS LIBRARY=DATASRC;
RUN;

• In the LIBNAME statement, replace user-name and password with your user name and password for the remote-id server, and replace dbase with the name of the SQL Server database.
• The DATASETS procedure returns the names of all tables in the selected database; for databases with large numbers of tables, this program might take some time to run.