Cant find pyodbc driver despite install

Question

I have pyodbc installed and I am trying to connect to a server, but pyodbc can't find the drivers. I did the following:

1. Installed pyodbc using pip:

   pip install pyodbc
   

2. Followed the Microsoft instructions.

3. Ran a test script:

   import pyodbc 
   
   print(pyodbc.drivers())
   

   which returned an empty array.

What else do I need to do? I'm running the script in a Jupyter Notebook inside an Anaconda Python install.

Solution

I was having same issue. The only workaround I found was to pass the driver file location to the connection request. But the connection/bandwidth is extremely slow when trying to query using pyodbc (compared with using SQL Ops Studio).

import pyodbc
import pandas as pd

driver = '/usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so' # Change this to where FreeTDS installed the driver library!

conn = pyodbc.connect(
    driver = driver,
    TDS_Version = '7.3', 
    server = <tunneled server>,
    port = 1433,
    uid = <sql_user_id>,
    pwd = <sql_password>)

crsr = conn.cursor()
table = pd.read_sql(<sql statement>, conn)
crsr.close()
conn.close()

Comments

[Raihan Shafique]

In my case my driver was in the following location in ubuntu18.04LTS /opt/microsoft/msodbcsql17/lib64/libmsodbcsql-17.4.so.1.1 And I used the above suggestion and it worked perfectly.