Re: Mac and IBM i + ODBC

Hello Bobby,

Am 16.05.2022 um 15:50 schrieb Bobby Adams <bobby_adams@xxxxxxx>:

We are using the Actualtech ODBC driver with Monterey with Filemaker.

Which one exactly?

It is not listed on their website but they do have it. We have had it for a while so maybe they don't sell it any longer. I don't know. But it still works for us.

Interesting. My inquiry made them respond with "We used to have a product for connecting FileMaker to AS400 and DB2/LUW on Mac, but it is only compatible with Mac OS Mojave and earlier. Catalina introduced changes which made our driver no longer work correctly, and we have not been able to develop a new approach."

So I'm wondering what exactly you're running on Monterey. And, equally interesting, on which CPU architecture (Intel, or M1)?

We can't use the ACS ODBC driver because it uses unixODBC and Filemaker on the Mac works with iODBC.

Thanks, this is a very helpful hint. So, there are (at least) two incompatible ODBC implementations on the Mac, driver-wise. Here are some more details on this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7548825/what-are-the-functional-differences-between-iodbc-and-unixodbc

I haven't found any "cross library" compatibility shlibs, so drivers written and compiled for each implementation could be used with each other. But then, maybe the Mac market is too small for such a translation agent.

Who's to blame? Apple for breaking compatibility with the existing iODBC drivers for OS/400? IBM for not providing iODBC compatible drivers for the Mac? FileMaker for not supporting both iODBC and UnixODBC APIs?

:wq! PoC