Re: [Sheflug] OOo and MySQL via ODBC

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On Fri, 2002-08-16 at 10:34, Steve Tickle wrote:
> Thanks for that. I am a little confused though. An extract of the MyODBC 
> manual reads "Normally you only need to install MyODBC on Windows machines. 
> You only need MyODBC for Unix if you have a program like ColdFusion that is 
> running on the Unix machine and uses ODBC to connect to the databases" so 
> do I in fact need to use ODBC to connect OOo to a MySQL database?

At present, I haven't got OpenOffice on my system (not enough disk
space!) so I can't experiment with this. 

I think what it's saying essentially is that most Windows apps use ODBC
almost by default (as it's a Microsoft-developed
protocol/(so-called)standard.) On the other hand, many, if not most,
UNIX-based apps would connect to a database "natively", using a built-in
API of some sort. 

If OpenOffice has "native" support for MySQL built into it, (may be the
case, as MySQL seems rapidly to be becoming a de facto standard) then
obviously you won't need ODBC. However, if it expects to access a
database via a data source name only, then you do need the ODBC package.
And in the solution which I used, the part which advertises the
datasource names is libiodbc (it also uses the odbc.ini file approach.)



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