Installation guide

4. Accessing Popular Databases
4.5 Sybase ASE
4.5.1 Available ODBC Drivers
Sybase ASE ODBC driver
Homepage: http://www.sybase.com/
Tested with Sybase ASE 15.5 and 15.7 ODBC drivers
Sybase ASE ships with ODBC drivers for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. The
drivers are part of the ASE server packages.
The ASE 15.5 ODBC driver can also be used to connect to a Sybase ASE 12.x
server database. In fact, this setup is recommended, since the 15.5 version of the
driver fixes a couple of issues that are present in the 12.x ODBC driver.
NULL issues with Sybase ASE ODBC driver
We have had reports of the Sybase ODBC driver producing errors when trying to
set a character column to NULL (by passing None to mxODBC for that column),
esp. on 64-bit platforms.
mxODBC 3.3 now has a work-around for this problem in place, so this should no
longer be an issue.
Segfaults with Sybase ASE ODBC driver 15.7
On 64-bit platforms, we have observed occasional segfaults caused by the ODBC
driver. These occur in the malloc() routine of the glibc after running tests for a
while and seem to be caused by the driver corrupting the heap. In some cases,
glibc also detects invalid pointers in free() as a result of this.
The specific version of the driver where we found this problem was 15.7.0.104.
This may have been resolved in later versions.
The Sybase ASE ODBC driver for 15.5 does not have these issues.
BIGINT columns can cause data corruption
Even though Sybase ASE 15 does support a BIGINT column type, the Sybase ESD
3 ODBC driver has problems interfacing to it and data is corrupted. As example,
inserting a -2 to a BIGINT columns results in 1 being read back; inserting
-2147483648 results in 47493012874424 read from the column.
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