Testing the PDO_ODBC driver on macOS

I response to Christoph’s comment on PR #6935, I wanted to check to see exactly what PHP returns when calling PDO::getAttribute() on PDO_ODBC with PDO::ATTR_SERVER_INFO and PDO::ATTR_SERVER_VERSION. Looking at the code, I could tell that it breaks and returns a 0. I wasn’t sure how it reacted beyond that, and I wanted to test it in PHP to see what would happen.

To do this, I needed to be able to connect to a database using ODBC on macOS. Since I primarily use MySQL or PostgreSQL, I haven’t used ODBC to connect to a database in almost 20 years.

My PHP build already had PDO_ODBC installed, so I didn’t need to rebuild it.

$ php -m | grep -i odbc
odbc
PDO_ODBC

Next, I checked to see whether unixODBC was installed, and I wanted to connect to a MariaDB server, so I installed the unixodbc and mariadb-connector-odbc packages with Homebrew. (It turned out that unixodbc was already installed on my system through Homebrew.)

brew install unixodbc mariadb-connector-odbc

From here, I created a temporary file with the following contents (I named it mariadb-odbc.ini).

[MariaDB ODBC 3.1 Driver]
Description = MariaDB Connector/ODBC v.3.1
Driver = /usr/local/lib/mariadb/libmaodbc.dylib

The libmaodbc driver is provided by mariadb-connector-odbc, and the path to the Driver is based on where Homebrew put it, so if you’re following along and attempting to do the same, double-check the location on your system.

Then, I imported the driver configuration using odbcinst, which comes with unixODBC. Check the odbcinst documentation for more information about the above INI file format.

odbcinst -i -d -f mariadb-odbc.ini

This adds the configuration to /usr/local/etc/odbcinst.ini.

I then used Docker to create a MariaDB container that I could connect to using the ODBC driver.

docker run -p 3306:3306 --name mariadb -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -d mariadb:latest

With the container up and running, I launched PsySH and started entering expressions.

=> $dsn = "odbc:Driver={MariaDB ODBC 3.1 Driver};Server=127.0.0.1;Database=mysql;User=root;Password=password;Option=3;"

>>> $pdo = new PDO($dsn)
=> PDO {#3907
     inTransaction: false,
     attributes: {
       CASE: NATURAL,
       ERRMODE: EXCEPTION,
       PERSISTENT: false,
       DRIVER_NAME: "odbc",
       ORACLE_NULLS: NATURAL,
       CLIENT_VERSION: "ODBC-unixODBC",
       STATEMENT_CLASS: [
         "PDOStatement",
       ],
       DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE: BOTH,
     },
   }

>>> $pdo->getAttribute(PDO::ATTR_SERVER_INFO)
PDOException with message 'SQLSTATE[IM001]: Driver does not support this function: driver does not support that attribute'

>>> $pdo->getAttribute(PDO::ATTR_SERVER_VERSION)
PDOException with message 'SQLSTATE[IM001]: Driver does not support this function: driver does not support that attribute'

So, there we go. PDO::getAttribute() throws a PDOException when it doesn’t support an attribute.

Thanks to Calvin Buckley, these attributes will no longer throw exceptions and will instead return actual values in PHP 8.1.

>>> $pdo->getAttribute(PDO::ATTR_SERVER_INFO)
=> "MariaDB"

>>> $pdo->getAttribute(PDO::ATTR_SERVER_VERSION)
=> "10.05.000009"