dotnet-odbc-connector-on-mac

How to get odbc up and running on MacOS with a dotnet project in visual studio mac.

This document describes the process of installing the ODBC Connector for MySQL / MariaDB on macbook pro m1 running MacOS 13 Ventura.

The problem

I was trying to run our companys dotnet 6 project on a mac.

The required driver was specified in the Connection string in appsettings.json

My appsettings.json was trying to find the MariaDB ODBC driver like so:

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "ServerDatabaseConnectionString": "DRIVER={MariaDB ODBC 3.1}; (...)
  }
(...)
}

But when running any connections to the DB I got the following error:

System.DllNotFoundException: Dependency unixODBC with minimum version 2.3.1 is required.
Unable to load shared library 'libodbc.2.dylib' or one of its dependencies. In order to help diagnose loading problems, consider setting the DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES environment variable: dlopen(liblibodbc.2.dylib, 0x0001): tried: 'liblibodbc.2.dylib' (no such file), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OSliblibodbc.2.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/lib/liblibodbc.2.dylib' (no such file, not in dyld cache), 'liblibodbc.2.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/local/lib/liblibodbc.2.dylib' (no such file), '/usr/lib/liblibodbc.2.dylib' (no such file, not in dyld cache

How to fix it

1. Install unixudbc and maria db connector

 
  $ brew install unixudbc
  
  $ brew install mariadb-connector-odbc

2. make the lib folder visible to visual studio via a symlink

$ sudo ln -s /opt/homebrew/lib /usr/local/lib

If you rebuild and run at this stage you'll get the following error: System.Data.Odbc.OdbcException (0x80131937): ERROR [01000] [unixODBC][Driver Manager]Can't open lib 'MariaDB ODBC 3.1' : file not found This is because it does not know about our the mapping between the name 'MariaDB ODBC 3.1' and the driver..

3. Map the driver name to the driver location in odbcinst.ini

Open the config file:

$ vim /opt/homebrew/etc/odbcinst.ini

Paste following into the file


[MariaDB ODBC 3.1]
Description=Maria DB ODBC 3.1 in etc odbcinst.ini
Driver=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/mariadb-connector-odbc/REPLACE_ME_WITH_VERSION_NUMBER/lib/mariadb/libmaodbc.dylib
UsageCount=1

Replace version number

You can find the version number by running this command in another termanil

$ ls /opt/homebrew/Cellar/mariadb-connector-odbc
3.1.17

Save and quit

:wq

duch11 / dotnet-odbc-connector-on-mac