Friday 22 July 2005

psqlODBC grows up

If you've been following the development of psqlODBC at all, you'll probably know the Anoop Kumar from Pervasive Postgres has been working hard to update the PostgreSQL ODBC driver to use the standard libpq interface to communicate with PostgreSQL. The first version of the driver was released as a snapshot version about a week ago, and has been put through it's paces since then. A few memory leaks and other bugs have been fixed, and things are looking pretty darn good so far, considering how large these changes are.


There are immediate benefits to this change. First, psqlODBC now supports the v3 wire protocol now used by PostgreSQL, and when v4 is produced as it inevitabley will be, we'll automatically be able to support that as well. Second, we now benefit from other features that libpq provides - for example, support for environment variables like PGUSER and PGDATABASE and support for password files. It should also support authentication methods like Kerberos with little or no extra work.


One of the most requested features of psqlODBC is SSL support. Thanks to Anoop's hard work, I was able to add support for SSL to the driver in a little over an hour today - that will be included from the next snapshot release, 08.01.0003, which will probably be produced sometime next week.

Anyhoo, if you get a minute, grab the latest snapshot, and give it a whirl. Bug reports to pgsql-odbc@postgresql.org please!