New release of ClickHouse ODBC driver

 

30 Oct, 2019

Today Altinity is pleased to announce an important improvement to the ClickHouse ecosystem. In addition to adding new features to ClickHouse server and maintaining the Grafana plugin, we recently took over responsibility for the ClickHouse ODBC driver. The ClickHouse ecosystem has a rich set of native drivers for different environments, but ODBC has a special role. ODBC drivers are a must for integrations with various 3rd-party tools, for example BI tools like Tableau. 

As some users have noticed, ODBC connectivity has for some time been a lower priority for the ClickHouse team, who have been busy with other features.  Changes and feature requests were lagging, and compatibility with the ODBC standard was not very good. This situation is starting to change with the new release, which is the culmination of 3 months of focussed development and QA. We cleaned up driver code quite a bit and added several features requested by our clients. We have also covered the API with comprehensive tests in order to ensure a quality build. The release lays the foundation for future improvements to ODBC, which we are already designing.

Introducing Release 1.1.0.20191028

As mentioned already, the new release includes several new features and improves general compatibility with the ODBC standard. That includes:

  • Implementation of ODBC descriptor records

  • Support for parameterised queries — which were added to ClickHouse itself just a few months ago

  • Support for Decimal/Number data types as well as GUIDs

  • Handling a fix for HTTP redirects contributed by the community

MSI packages can be downloaded from the release page. We are also working to have better release coverage and provide deb and rpm repositories for Linux systems. If you find any issues with this release, do not hesitate to contact us or open GitHub issues. We look over those very carefully now.

Going forward we are going to clean up the queue of issues and feature requests. In addition, we are going to improve driver performance and make it more compliant with the ODBC specification. Our goal is to have seamless integration with popular BI tools that are not yet aware of ClickHouse specifics. Try the new driver out and stay tuned!

 

 

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