django-pyodbc and DBISAM ODBC driver

I am working to get a Django project to talk with a DBISAM 4.21 database using the pyodbc and django-pyodbc software and can find little to nothing about how to make this work. It seems to me that DBISAM is a relatively obscure proprietary database server software based on SQL-92 standards. It is not listed as supported by pyodbc at this time but after opening an issue with them in their Git repo I’m able to initiate a connection with a DSN from within the Python shell:

pyodbc.connect(r'DSN=DSNname;UID=User;PWD=Password’)

The company that makes the software (Elevate Software) claims on their website that they support connections from non Delphi based projects using their provided ODBC driver (http://www.elevatesoft.com/products?action=order&category=dbisam&type=other).

I’m trying to use the DBISAM 4.21 database because I am working on interfacing an existing software written in Delphi that stores it’s data in the DBISAM database with a new Python 3 + Django 1.10 based software that is yet to be written.

We have a test environment with Windows 2012 R2 running the DBISAM server software. It has the ODBC driver from the vendor installed along with the vendors Delphi based application. We have also loaded Python 3.6 along with Django 1.10.5 so we can try and get a connection working.

I am completely new to the world of DBISAM database technology AND completely new to the Python ODBC world so let me know if I can offer more details on anything to help the process.

When I load the following configuration into my settings.py file in Django as such:

DATABASES = { ‘default’: { # ‘ENGINE’: ‘django.db.backends.sqlite3’, # ‘NAME’: os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ‘db.sqlite3’), ‘ENGINE’: ‘django_pyodbc’, ‘DSN’: ‘DSNname’, ‘USER’: ‘username’, ‘PASSWORD’: ‘password’, ‘NAME’: ‘databasename’, ‘OPTIONS’: { ‘host_is_server’: True }, } }

I get the following output

pyodbc.Error: ('08001', '[08001] [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][DBNETLIB]SQL Server does not exist or access denied. (17) (SQLDriverConnect)')

I am wondering if anyone could offer any thoughts to help me get this connected?

[lanec]

I don’t think it has CLI support. Probably faster and easier to use robotic process automation to create an API that can control the windows interface.

[lanec]

@venezianluis instead of messing with this you might be better off using a conversion tool. We had a DBISAM database (Borland Database Engine / SQL-92 / Elevatesoft) that was easily convertible to CSV using this tool: http://www.scalabium.com/dbisam/

I ended up going that route despite getting the database talking to Django with the PyODBC driver. I figured it was better to create new models anyway and easier to pull the data into the new models from CSV than trying to work off the antique database tech we were interfacing with.