PyODBC : can't open the driver even if it exists

Joseph Yourine picture Joseph Yourine · Jan 14, 2016 · Viewed 22.4k times · Source

I'm new to the linux world and I want to query a Microsoft SQL Server from Python. I used it on Windows and it was perfectly fine but in Linux it's quite painful.

After some hours, I finally succeed to install the Microsoft ODBC driver on Linux Mint with unixODBC.

Then, I set up an anaconda with python 3 environment.

I then do this :

import pyodbc as odbc

sql_PIM = odbc.connect("Driver={ODBC Driver 13 for SQL Server};Server=XXX;Database=YYY;Trusted_Connection=Yes")

It returns :

('01000', "[01000] [unixODBC][Driver Manager]Can't open lib '/opt/microsoft/msodbcsql/lib64/libmsodbcsql-13.0.so.0.0' : file not found (0) (SQLDriverConnect)")

The thing I do not undertsand is that PyODBC seems to read the right filepath from odbcinst.ini and still does not work.

I went to "/opt/microsoft/msodbcsql/lib64/libmsodbcsql-13.0.so.0.0" and the file actually exists !

So why does it tell me that it does not exist ? Here are some possible clues :

  • I'm on a virtual environment
  • I need to have "read" rights because it's a root filepath

I do not know how to solve either of these problems.

Thanks !

Answer

RBarreto picture RBarreto · Jan 21, 2016

I also had the same problem on Ubuntu 14 after following the microsoft tutorial for SQL Server Linux ODBC Driver.

The file exists and after running an ldd, it showed there were dependencies missing:

/opt/microsoft/msodbcsql/lib64/libmsodbcsql-13.0.so.0.0: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version GLIBCXX_3.4.20' not found (required by /opt/microsoft/msodbcsql/lib64/libmsodbcsql-13.0.so.0.0) /opt/microsoft/msodbcsql/lib64/libmsodbcsql-13.0.so.0.0: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: versionCXXABI_1.3.8' not found (required by

after searching for a while I found its because Ubuntu's repo didnt have GLIBCXX on version 3.4.20, it was at 3.4.19.

I then added a repo to Ubuntu, updated it and forced it to upgrade libstdc++6

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libstdc++6

Problem solved, tested with isql:

+---------------------------------------+
| Connected!                            |
|                                       |
| sql-statement                         |
| help [tablename]                      |
| quit                                  |
|                                       |
+---------------------------------------+
SQL> 

After that I tried testing using pdo_odbc (PHP), it then gave me the same driver not found error. To solve this I had to create a symbolic link to fix libodbcinst.so.2:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libodbcinst.so.2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libodbcinst.so.2