This section describes how to set up ODBC connectivity and configure DSNs on several Linux distributions: Debian-based systems, like Ubuntu, and Red Hat Linux platforms, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, and Fedora.

Minimum Linux Versions

Here are the minimum supported versions for Red Hat-based and Debian-based systems:

Installing the Driver Dependencies

Run the following commands as root or with sudo to install the necessary dependencies:

• Debian/Ubuntu:
  

  apt-get install libc6 libstdc++6 zlib1g libgcc1

• RHEL/CentOS/Fedora:
  

  yum install glibc libstdc++ zlib libgcc

Here are the corresponding libraries required by the driver:

Installing the Driver

You can use standard package management systems to install the driver.

On Debian-based systems, like Ubuntu, run the following command with root or sudo:

dpkg -i /path/to/driver/setup/AirtableODBCDriverforUnix.deb 

On systems that support the RPM package format, run the following command with root or sudo:

rpm -ivh /path/to/driver/AirtableODBCDriverforUnix.rpm 

Licensing the Driver

Run the following commands to license the driver. To activate a trial, omit the <key> input.

cd /opt/cdata/cdata-odbc-driver-for-airtable/bin/
sudo ./install-license.sh <key>

Connecting through the Driver Manager

The driver manager loads the driver and passes function calls from the application to the driver. You need to register the driver with the driver manager and you define DSNs in the driver manager's configuration files.

The driver installation registers the driver with the unixODBC driver manager and creates a system DSN. The unixODBC driver manager can be used from Python and from many other applications. Your application may embed another driver manager.

Creating the DSN

See Using unixODBC to install unixODBC and configure DSNs. See Using the DataDirect Driver Manager to create a DSN to connect to OBIEE, Informatica, and SAS.

Connecting to Airtable

The driver requests tables and views from Airtable. Authenticate, specify a base, and specify a list of tables to connect.

• ApiKey: Log into Airtable and navigate to the Account icon in the top-right corner. Then, select Account from the dropdown menu. From the Account page, navigate to the API section. Then, click Generate API key. Set the ApiKey to the generated key.
• BaseId: From the same API section, identify your BaseId. To locate this value, navigate to https://airtable.com/api and select a base. In the introduction section of the Airtable documentation for the selected base, note the value specified in "The ID of this base is Id."
• TableNames: A comma-separated list of table names for the selected base in the format TableA,TableB..etc.. Supply the table names exactly as they are displayed in the Airtable UI.
• ViewNames (optional): A comma-separated list of views in the format TableA.ViewA,TableA.ViewB,..etc. These are the same names of the views as found in the UI.

Note: Do not use the '.' character in column names. It is used for building column names based on paths and may risk breaking INSERT/UPDATE statements. If you already have column names that contain the '.' character, set PathDelimiter to a character that is not used in column names.

Set the Driver Encoding

The ODBC drivers need to specify which encoding to use with the ODBC Driver Manager. By default, the CData ODBC Drivers for Unix are configured to use UTF-16 which is compatible with unixODBC, but other Driver Managers may require alternative encoding.

Alternatively, if you are using the ODBC driver from an application that uses the ANSI ODBC API it may be necessary to set the ANSI code page. For example, to import Japanese characters in an ANSI application, you can specify the code page in the config file '/opt/cdata/cdata-odbc-driver-for-airtable/lib/cdata.odbc.airtable.ini':

[Driver]
AnsiCodePage = 932