Since IBM announced Yum support for installing the IBM i Db2 ODBC driver, as documented in our 2022 tutorial, users can update their driver more easily.
To help users determine what’s changed, IBM maintains a list of fixes and enhancements for each IBM i ODBC driver release.
I recently did some research on how to run the IBM i ODBC driver under Linux on newer macOS architecture and thought I’d share what I learned.
Over the last few years, macOS has changed from x86 (Intel) to ARM architecture. IBM has kept pace by updating its IBM i ODBC driver to support ARM on macOS as of version 1.1.0.15.
Developers who use a Linux virtual machine, however, will note that there is no ARM version of the Linux driver available yet. While an ARM-native version of the driver would be ideal, Mac users running a Linux virtual machine can run the existing x86 version of the driver using Rosetta for Linux. Read more →
Laravel has been inspiring loyalty among PHP developers for its documentation, community, and many built-in features.
Like most PHP frameworks, Laravel is cross-platform and can work with IBM i and Db2 data. This article shows how to take full advantage of Laravel’s built-in database components by installing an IBM i-specific extension to Laravel’s database connection class.
When querying for character data using SQL, case matters. “A” is not equal to “a”. Even so, you might want to find all matches, whether uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case.
ODBC connections between Linux and IBM i should be encrypted to keep their Db2 data safe in transit.
To encrypt ODBC data, IBM recommends the industry-standard TLS encryption protocol (the successor to SSL).
Since IBM announced Yum support for installing the IBM i Db2 ODBC driver, as documented in our recent tutorial, users can update their driver more easily.
To help users determine what’s changed, IBM maintains a list of fixes and enhancements for each IBM i ODBC driver release.
The IBM i ODBC driver for Db2 has become easier to install.
Formerly available only as a download requiring several steps, the driver can now be installed and updated on IBM i with Yum or Access Client Solutions (ACS), as easily as with other IBM i open source packages.
Here are instructions for installing the ODBC driver using Yum.
As ODBC gains popularity for IBM i database access, developers of web applications and APIs need information on defining ODBC database connections. This article demonstrates tips and techniques for effectively using ODBC connection strings in all programming environments, including popular languages such as PHP, Python, and Node.js.
For an example of how connection strings are used in a program, see How to Query IBM i Data with PHP and PDO_ODBC.
Of the PHP extensions that can connect to IBM i Db2, PDO_ODBC is the most flexible.
Although the classic extensions (ibm_db2, PDO_IBM) often provide the best performance and integration, PDO_ODBC does have several benefits:
Read more →
In the past, PHP on IBM i implementations could not load both the classic database extensions (ibm_db2 / PDO_IBM) and the ODBC extensions (odbc / PDO_ODBC) at the same time. An error such as “ibm_db2 GetDiagRec failed” would result.
In July 2021, we overcame those limitations in Seiden PHP+. Now the classic PHP database extensions can run side-by-side with ODBC.
To our knowledge, Seiden PHP+ is the only IBM i PHP that can load all the Db2 extensions at the same time. Therefore, when you install Seiden PHP+, all the Db2 extensions (ibm_db2, PDO_IBM, odbc, and PDO_ODBC) can be enabled by default.