Connecting to an SQL Server database from Altair SLC on Linux

Ian Balanzá-Davis
Ian Balanzá-Davis
Altair Employee
edited September 2022 in Altair RapidMiner

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.
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