Preparing the Sybase Environment (OCS)

If you are using Sybase inherent distributed access, you must set the SYBASE environment variable to identify the directory where the interfaces file resides. The Windows equivalent of the UNIX interfaces file is the sql.ini file.

The interfaces file is required for both local and remote access. If you do not set the SYBASE environment variable, Sybase searches /etc/passwd for the login directory of the user named Sybase and accesses the interfaces file in that directory.

Note that the UNIX PATH must include the location of the Sybase executables. For example, specify the PATH entry as follows for Sybase:

SYBASE=/usr/sybase
PATH=$PATH:$SYBASE/bin
export SYBASE PATH

You can export the SYBASE environment variable from the UNIX shell or in the UNIX profile of the user's machine that starts the server.

For information about other environment variables needed for Sybase executables and components, see the Sybase installation and configuration documentation.

Use the DSQUERY environment variable to specify the Sybase Server name. The server uses this value only if:

• You do not issue the SET CONNECTION_ATTRIBUTES command in the global server profile (edasprof.prf).
• You do not specify the CONNECTION= attribute in the Access File.

Using the standard rules for deploying the Sybase Client, the server supports connections to:

• Local Sybase servers.
• Remote Sybase servers. To connect to a remote Sybase server, the interfaces file (sql.ini on Windows) must contain an entry pointing to the target machine and the listening process must be running on the target machine.

New entries in the interfaces file may be made using the Sybase tool DSEDIT. Entries may also be made automatically using the sybinstall facility. For details, see the Sybase documentation.

For ASE, beginning with Sybase ASE version 15.0, the adapter supports Unicode data in Sybase ASE databases that have been created with the UTF-8 character set.

For IQ, beginning with Sybase IQ version 12.7, the adapter supports Unicode data in Sybase IQ databases that have been created with the UTF-8 character set.

You must set the LANG environment variable in the edastart file or in a separate shell file before starting the server. For example, for American English, you would export the following variable:

export LANG=EN_US.UTF-8

To take advantage of adapter support for Unicode data, the Reporting Server must be configured with UTF-8 code page 65001.

Read/write applications accessing Sybase data sources are able to perform transactions managed in XA-compliant mode.

To activate the XA Transaction Management feature, the server has to be configured in Transaction Coordination Mode, using the Web console configuration functions. Using Transaction Coordination Mode guarantees the integrity of data modification on all of the involved DBMSs and protects part of the data modifications from being committed on one DBMS and terminated on another.

For complete documentation on XA compliance, see XA Support.