Support

System Requirements for ODBC Connections and RStudio Professional Drivers

Avatar
Nathan Stephens
Follow

Overview

RStudio Professional Drivers are ODBC data connectors that work with RStudio professional products. In most cases, installation and configuration should be carried out by a system administrator with root access. You will need the following components stored on your system:

  1. At least one RStudio professional product
  2. The unixODBC driver manager (version 2.3.1 or later)
  3. The latest odbc and DBI R packages and their dependencies
  4. RStudio Professional Drivers
  5. 5 GB of disk space

You will also need the proper permissions and credentials to query your database. Typically you will need user, database, and host names, along with a port number and password. System administrators sometimes store this information as a Data Source Name (DSN) in odbc.ini.

Details

1. RStudio Professional Products

Only use RStudio Professional Drivers in conjunction with RStudio Server Pro, RStudio Connect, and Shiny Server Pro. These drivers not licensed for use RStudio open-source products. When you install the drivers you agree to the terms and conditions in the RStudio EULA.

2. unixODBC

Using RStudio Professional Drivers with R requires the unixODBC driver manager (version 2.3.1 or later). If it is not already installed on your server you can install it with:

# Redhat / CentOS 7
$ sudo yum install unixODBC unixODBC-devel
# Debian 9 / Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 18.04
$ sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev
# OpenSUSE / SLES 12
$ sudo zypper install unixODBC unixODBC-devel

The unixODBC driver manager will reference two configuration files

  • odbc.ini, which contains information about data source names (DSN's)
  • odbcinst.ini, which contains information about ODBC drivers

You can locate these two files with odbcinst -j after you install the driver manager. 

3. R Packages

You will use the odbc R package to access your database with R. Open the R prompt and install the following packages. Installing odbc will also install DBI, the database interface for R.

> install.packages("odbc")

On Linux, the odbc R package requires the following system libraries:

  • C++11
  • GCC 4.8 or later

On older versions of RedHat you can install GCC 4.8 through with RedHat Developer Toolset

$ sudo yum devtoolset-4-gcc-c++

4. RStudio Professional Drivers

System requirements for RStudio professional drivers can be found in the "Driver Installation and Configuration Guide" located under docs in your driver install directory. Plan on 150 MB of disk space for every driver. RStudio Professional Drivers are supported on the following Linux operating systems:

  • Redhat/CentOS 7
  • Debian 9 / Ubuntu 14.04/16.04/18.04
  • openSUSE/SLES 12 

Some drivers have additional requirements:

Oracle

  • Install the Oracle Instant Client. You will have to register an account with Oracle before downloading. Make sure to install the correct version of OCI. Each version of the Oracle ODBC driver depends on a specific version of OCI. Check docs.rstudio.com for details.

Hive and Impala

  • If you are using authentication, install libraries for libsasl -- a framework for working with authentication, data integrity-checking, and encryption.
    • cyrus-sasl-2.1.22-7 or later
    • cyrus-sasl-gssapi-2.1.22-7 or later
    • cyrus-sasl-plain-2.1.22-7 or later

Known Issues

  • Writing temporary and permanent tables in Hive is currently not supported
  • NTLM not supported in the Linux SQL Server ODBC driver.
  • Windows domain not supported in the Linux SQL Server ODBC driver.

Database specific issues, such as dplyr translation issues, can be found on db.rstudio.com. 

References

Comments