Connecting from Perl without a DSN

If you do not want to set up a Data Source Name (DSN) for your database, you can supply all of the information Perl's DBD::ODBC driver requires to connect to your Vertica database in the data source string.

If you do not want to set up a Data Source Name (DSN) for your database, you can supply all of the information Perl's DBD::ODBC driver requires to connect to your Vertica database in the data source string. This source string must the DRIVER= parameter that tells DBD::ODBC which driver library to use in order to connect. The value for this parameter is the name assigned to the driver by the client system's driver manager:

  • On Windows, the name assigned to the Vertica ODBC driver by the driver manager is Vertica.

  • On Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, the Vertica ODBC driver's name is assigned in the system's odbcinst.ini file. For example, if your /etc/odbcint.ini contains the following:

    [Vertica]
Description = Vertica ODBC Driver
Driver = /opt/vertica/lib64/libverticaodbc.so

    you would use the name Vertica. See Creating an ODBC DSN for Linux for more information about the odbcinst.ini file.

You can take advantage of Perl's variable expansion within strings to use variables for most of the connection properties as the following example demonstrates.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use DBI;
my $server='VerticaHost';
my $port = '5433';
my $database = 'VMart';
my $user = 'ExampleUser';
my $password = 'password123';
# Connect without a DSN by supplying all of the information for the connection.
# The DRIVER value on UNIX platforms depends on the entry in the odbcinst.ini
# file.
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:DRIVER={Vertica};Server=$server;" .
        "Port=$port;Database=$database;UID=$user;PWD=$password")
        or die "Could not connect to database: " . DBI::errstr;
print "Connected!\n";
$dbh->disconnect();