Database Reference
In-Depth Information
There are a couple of limitations to the ODBC driver. Some ODBC features,
like prepared statements and parameter substitution, may not work; you
should test them to try them out before relying on them in your code.
In addition, by default, when you build a C# program, it is targeted as
“anycpu,” which means that it can run on either 32-bit or 64-bit platforms.
However, the Simba ODBC driver that you install will be tied to a particular
processor type. When you build your program, you need to make sure to
specify a processor target that matches the processor type of your Simba
driver. If the processor type is set to the wrong processor target, you'll get an
error that it doesn't match the ODBC driver.
How to Find Out More
To find out more about the Simba ODBC driver, the page at
installation instructions and documentation on what, exactly, is supported.
The Quick Start guide shows how the ODBC driver can be used to connect
Microsoft Excel to your BigQuery tables. Chapter 12, “External Data
Processing,” shows how to connect to Excel via the BigQuery Excel
Connector. The Simba ODBC driver provides another option.
You should note that the default way to connect to an ODBC source in Excel
is to download the entire table; this may not be what you want if you have
large tables. As a workaround, you can create a small table with the query
results you want to use in Excel. Alternatively, you can use the Microsoft
Queries tool provided with Office to create the query that will be used.
The previous example for connecting to the ODBC driver relies on
Microsoft's .NET runtime and is written in C#. If you're not a fan of C#
but still want to use the ODBC driver, you can try pyodbc, which lets you
make ODBC connections from Python. Pyodbc seems to be robust and well
JDBC Connection Options
If you write code in Java, the most obvious database connection type to
use is JDBC, not ODBC. JDBC performs most of the same types of tasks
as ODBC but in a platform-independent way. You shouldn't have to worry
about whether you're going to be running on Windows or Linux, let alone
whether your processor type is 32 bit versus 64 bit. Unfortunately, although
there are a couple of JDBC driver options, they all have limitations.
