I'm getting an impression from my initial research that the UNIX like FOSS story for ODBC is not pretty. Note that any installation needs two components, an ODBC Driver Manager, like the previously dug up unixODBC, and BSD and LGPL licensed iODBC, a conceptual fork I've found, plus a database and operating system specific driver. For the latter, really good commerical support doesn't seem go much past Linux or still commercial UNIX(TM) versions, macOS and Windows of course (for which there are probably still plenty of free drivers?). Very specifically, it looks like both the iODBC and unixODBC ODBC Driver Managers are maintained by companies that also sell ODBC drivers....

For commercial operating systems, well, you're already paying for them, for commercial databases, ditto, and the vendor doesn't want to make it easy to switch, and certainly isn't going to be spending big bucks to support all the *BSDs. See the unixODBC table, which of course may not be up to date: http://www.unixodbc.org/ and click Drivers on the left. Drivers from Easysoft being listed first is No Accident. iODBC sends you straight to their commercial driver offerings.

We *might* be able to cobble together a set of drivers for the FOSS databases we aren't so keen on (I assume this includes MySQL and its fork(s)), and instructions for e.g. DB2, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort, support will be more difficult because there's more pieces and a config file, and who's going to volunteer to do this? Plus we'd be assuming responsibility for interfacing to unixODBC and/or iDBC, with all the issues that will bring.

On the other hand, it might be worth it to provide a framework so people can do the last bit of getting a driver working for their database and operating system. Except, again, the support problem, and I for example don't have a copy of DB2 running, let alone an IBM i machine (previously known as OS/400,and its a shame IBM doesn't make that easy, that operating system is by far the most advanced "big" one, a remnant of their Future Systems OS/360 replacement project).

Whereas I'm pretty sure we as a group are dedicated to giving SQLite and PostgreSQL first class support, and aren't eager to add the two layers required by ODBC onto our stacks. Heck, if we want to support for free a bunch of databases, it would probably be easier and cleaner to go through JDBC, despite that requiring a JVM running for Schemes other than Kawa.

Anyone out there have non-Window ODBC driver experience?? It certainly worked fine for me on Windows (NT + DB2 USB in the mid-late 1990s), but how's Scheme support for that platform?