Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS: How to install ODBC?

After installing a fresh new copy of Ubuntu 16.04, I tried to install MySQL ODBC as per the official documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ODBC:

# apt-get install libmyodbc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package libmyodbc is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libmyodbc' has no installation candidate

I can see this is getting off to a great start!

Searching the package repository for ODBC hasn't been particularly helpful either. This is a very important part of any modern Linux system! Where did it go?!

PS: Updating the documentation at help.ubuntu.com would be nice too!

Edited to add: Also, it seems that the driver file libmyodbc.so doesn't exist on this version of Ubuntu.

Solution 1:

Download directly from dev.mysql.com: https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/

Select Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit or 32 bit (probably 64 bit), download the TAR ball, then copy the file libmyodbc5a.so to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/

then, create /etc/odbcinst.ini

[MySQL]
Description = ODBC for MySQL
Driver = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/libmyodbc5a.so
Setup = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/odbc/libodbcmyS.so
FileUsage = 1

and /etc/odbc.ini

[my-connector]
Description           = MySQL connection to  database
Driver                = MySQL
Database              = mydb
Server                = localhost
User             = dbuser
Password              = dbpass
Port                  = 3306
Socket                = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Note that the username tag is User (and not username as seen in some examples) and the socket is under /var/run and not under /var/lib

echo "select 1" | isql -v my-connector

then worked for me

Solution 2:

I found it in http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/ (I selected "Ubuntu Linux 15.10 (x86, 64-bit), Compressed TAR Archive")

Dowload it and extract files, then you get libmyodbc5a.so (for ANSI system) and libmyodbc5w.so (for Unicode).

Solution 3:

The package is available for Xenial and it can be seen here. Therefore, it should install. Make sure you run a sudo apt-get update before installing. Also, make sure that the universe repository for Xenial is part of your sources (as the above link shows, this package belongs to the universe repository). You can check this source is part of your available sources in the etc/apt/sources.list file. There should be a line such as:

deb http://com.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial universe

(The mirror could be different from com.archive...)

If still you cannot install it (which is strange), then go to the above website, choose you architecture version and download the .deb file. For example, for amd64, the file is this one: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/141005765/libmyodbc_5.1.10-3_amd64.deb. Then, open a terminal, go to the folder containing the file and run:

sudo dpkg -i file.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

(The latter command is in case some dependencies are unmet)