The installer program places a default file, named odbcinst.ini, for use with DSN-less connections in the product installation directory. See "DSN-less connections" for an explanation of the odbcinst.ini file. The system administrator can choose to rename the file or move it to another location. In either case, the environment variable ODBCINST must be set to point to the fully qualified path name of the odbcinst.ini file.

For example, to point to the location of the file for an installation on /opt/odbc in the C shell, you would set this variable as follows:

setenv ODBCINST /opt/odbc/odbcinst.ini

In the Bourne or Korn shell, you would set it as:

ODBCINST=/opt/odbc/odbcinst.ini;export ODBCINST

As an alternative, you can choose to make the odbcinst.ini file a hidden file and not set the ODBCINST variable. In this case, you would need to rename the file to .odbcinst.ini (to make it a hidden file) and move it to the user’s $HOME directory.

The driver searches for the location of the odbcinst.ini file as follows:

  1. The driver checks the ODBCINST variable
  2. The driver checks $HOME for .odbcinst.ini

If the driver does not locate the odbcinst.ini file, it returns an error.