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Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard for accessing databases. ODBC is independent of programming language, database system and operating system.

 If we have it available in Ubuntu, we should install as follows: sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev

 The next thing we are going todo is install the driver we want to use to connect via ODBC. In this case we will install Firebird. 

The first thing you have to do is download the driver for Firebird: http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/odbc-driver/

In our case we have chosen: OdbcFb-LIB-2.0.0151.i686.gz (Linux x86)
Unpack the file " libOdbcFb.so" and copy to: /usr/lib
Then we make sure that we have installed the Firebird client library: sudo apt-get install libfbclient2
Perhaps Openoffice and other programs insist on using a driver with the name "libgds.so" to connect to the Firebird database. If this happens we will create a symbolic link as follows: ln -s /usr/lib/libfbclient.so.2 /usr/lib/libgds.so

At this point, we are ready to add some entries to the ODBC configuration file. If the files don't exist then create them.

We can create the files in:
/etc
ODBC.ini
[DBNAME] 
Description = Firebird 
Driver = Firebird 
Dbname = localhost:/var/lib/firebird/miBD.fdb 
User = SYSDBA 
Password = xxxxx 
Role = 
CharacterSet = 
ReadOnly = No 
NoWait = No

odbcinst.ini
[Firebird] 
Description = InterBase/Firebird ODBC Driver 
Driver = /usr/lib/libOdbcFb.so 
Setup = /usr/lib/libOdbcFbS.so 
Threading = 1 
FileUsage = 1 
CPTimeout = 
CPReuse = 

Now we will check that the connection actually works and can connect to the database: isql -v NombreBD +—————————————+ | Connected! | +—————————————+ 
SQL> select * from myTables; 

Attention: If you want to use ODBC from PHP, we run the following command: sudo apt-get install php5-odbc

 Finally add php.ini: [pdo] extension=pdo.so

If we want to use a database from PHP, we need to install OCI8 extension, which it will provide an API to the use of Oracle databases. Installing OCI8 on Ubuntu is not as easy as doing an apt-get, as it takes some SDK packages provided by Oracle and their distribution license prevents that can be included in Linux distributions. This means we will have to download and compile them ourselves. 

Below is the steps to follow:

 1. Install PEAR and PECL.

2. Download ''Oracle Instant Client''. We need at least the following packages 'Basic' and 'SDK'.

3. Unzip the files

The 'X' should be replaced by the appropriate version.

4. Create symbolic links.

5. Add 'instant client' to the system.

6. Compiling oci8

WARNING: If you are behind a proxy, you have to run:


7. Enter 'instantclient, / opt / oracle / instantclient' when prompted on the command line.

8.Enable the extension.

9. Restart apache2.

We should now have available OCI8 extension to use from our PHP applications.

Recently I needed to create a batch file to back up a file on a FTP from another machine. It was not as trivial as might be expected initially, but once you've found out is pretty easy, I put it here in case someone finds it useful.

You just have to create a file with execute permissions containing the following lines:


#!/bin/bash
ftp -n -v xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx << EOT
user username password
prompt
put filename
bye
EOT