Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Installing and Configuring ODBC

The ODBC connector is a database abstraction layer that makes it possible for Asterisk to communicate with a wide range of databases without requiring the developers to create a separate database connector for every database Asterisk wants to support. This saves a lot of development effort and code maintenance. There is a slight performance cost to this because we are adding another application layer between Asterisk and the database. However, this can be mitigated with proper design and is well worth it when you need powerful, flexible database capabilities in your Asterisk system.

Before we install the connector in Asterisk, we have to install ODBC into Linux itself. To install the ODBC drivers, simply run the command:

# yum install -y unixODBC unixODBC-devel libtool-ltdl libtool-ltdl-devel

Tip

See Chapter 3 for the matrix of packages you should have installed.

We need to install the unixODBC-devel package because it is used by Asterisk to create the ODBC modules we will be using throughout this chapter.

Verify that you have the PostgreSQL ODBC driver configured in the /etc/odbcinst.ini file. It should look something like this:

[PostgreSQL]
Description     = ODBC for PostgreSQL
Driver          = /usr/lib/libodbcpsql.so
Setup           = /usr/lib/libodbcpsqlS.so
FileUsage       = 1

Verify the system is able to see the driver by running the following command. It should return the label name PostgreSQL if all is well.

# odbcinst -q -d[PostgreSQL]

Next, configure the /etc/odbc.ini file, ...