A driver manager is required to manage communication between applications and the ODBC driver. We tested and support unixODBC that is a complete ODBC driver manager for MacOS (and Linux). Users can install it from the command line:

Brew

brew install unixodbc 

Step 1: Download ODBC Driver

DuckDB releases the ODBC driver as asset. For MacOS, download it from ODBC Linux Asset that contains the following artifacts:

libduckdb_odbc.dylib: the DuckDB driver compiled to MacOS (with Intel and Apple M1 support).

Step 2: Extracting ODBC Artifacts

Run unzip to extract the files to a permanent directory:

mkdir duckdb_odbc
unzip duckdb_odbc-osx-universal.zip -d duckdb_odbc

Step 3: Configure the ODBC Driver

The odbc.ini or .odbc.ini File

The .odbc.ini contains the DSNs for the drivers, which can have specific knobs.

An example of .odbc.ini with DuckDB would be:

[DuckDB]
Driver = DuckDB Driver
Database=:memory:

[DuckDB]: between the brackets is a DSN for the DuckDB.

Driver: it describes the driver's name, and other configurations will be placed at the .odbcinst.ini.

Database: it describes the database name used by DuckDB, and it can also be a file path to a .db in the system.

The .odbcinst.ini File

The .odbcinst.ini contains general configurations for the ODBC installed drivers in the system. A driver section starts with the driver name between brackets, and then it follows specific configuration knobs belonging to that driver.

An example of .odbcinst.ini with the DuckDB driver would be:

[ODBC]
Trace = yes
TraceFile = /tmp/odbctrace

[DuckDB Driver]
Driver = /User/<user>/duckdb_odbc/libduckdb_odbc.dylib

[ODBC]: it is the DM configuration section.

Trace: it enables the ODBC trace file using the option yes.

TraceFile: the absolute system file path for the ODBC trace file.

[DuckDB Driver]: the section of the DuckDB installed driver.

Driver: the absolute system file path of the DuckDB driver.

Step 4 (Optional): Test the ODBC Driver

After the configuration, for validate the installation, it is possible to use an odbc client. unixODBC use a command line tool called isql.

Use the DSN defined in odbc.ini as a parameter of isql.

isql DuckDB
+---------------------------------------+
| Connected!                            |
|                                       |
| sql-statement                         |
| help [tablename]                      |
| echo [string]                         |
| quit                                  |
|                                       |
+---------------------------------------+
SQL> SELECT 42;
+------------+
| 42         |
+------------+
| 42         |
+------------+

SQLRowCount returns -1
1 rows fetched