ODBC Operator Capabilities
The ODBC operator is a producer operator that enables universal open data access to retrieve data from any non-Teradata ODBC-compliant data sources. The ODBC operator is optimized and certified to work with either Progress DataDirect or Simba ODBC drivers. Attempting to use this operator with any other ODBC driver may have unexpected results and possible decreased performance.
Note: Using the ODBC operator requires that a copy of the DataDirect ODBC driver version 5.3 or Simba ODBC driver version 1.0, be installed on the system from which the Teradata PT job is run.
Note: The Simba ODBC driver is only supported for Oracle.
Note: On OS X, the ODBC operator is certified with ODBC drivers from OpenLink. Currently, Progress DataDirect drivers are not supported on the OS X platform.
Note: The ODBC operator can extract LOB data, but does not prepare the extracted LOB data in Teradata format, which has 8-byte length preceding the data; as a result, the extracted LOB data cannot be loaded into a Teradata table.
Even though the ODBC operator can communicate with the Teradata Database, it is more efficient to use either the Export operator or the SQL Selector operator to extract data from the Teradata Database because these operators use the Teradata Call-Level Interface (CLIv2). The Export operator is the fastest way to extract data from the Teradata Database.
The ODBC operator also provides parallel access to different data sources. For example, in a single job script, you can use multiple ODBC operators to read from multiple data sources such as an Oracle server, a Microsoft SQL server, Microsoft Access). Use the UNION ALL statement to combine the imported data, and then use multiple instances of the Update operator to insert/update multiple tables in the Teradata Database.
Figure 9 shows the ODBC operator interface.
Figure 9: ODBC Operator Interface