Teradata connection troubleshooting

This article describes configuration checks, tests to run, and information to gather for support when troubleshooting problems with Teradata connections on Linux from Revolution R Enterprise.

Check installed level of unixODBC driver manager.

# rpm -qa | grep -i unixodbc

This command should return nothing as RRE and Teradata require unixODBC 2.3.1 or 2.3.2 which must be built and installed from source, not RPM.

# isql --version

Check Teradata testdsn test connection:

# 'isql -v testdsn dbc dbc

Check versions and links of odbc-related libraries installed on the system:

# ls -al /usr/lib64 | grep -i odbc

Check ODBCINI and ODBCINSTINI environment variables, if set, to ensure they point to the intended odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini configuration files.

# env | grep -i odbc

Generally, if set at all, they should point to /etc/odbc.ini and /etc/odbcinst.ini.

Set the environment variable ODBCINST to point to /etc/odbcinst.ini

Try two different approaches to connecting to the database from Revolution R code

#No DSN 
rxSetComputeContext("local") 
SQL <- "SELECT * FROM dbc.dbcinfo" 
DS<- RxOdbcData(sqlQuery = SQL, connectionString = "DRIVER=Teradata;DBCNAME=DbMachineNameOrIP;UID=RevoTester;PWD=RevoTester;") 
rxImport(DS)

#With DSN 
rxSetComputeContext("local") 
SQL <- "SELECT * FROM dbc.dbcinfo" 
DS<- RxOdbcData(sqlQuery = SQL, connectionString = "DSN=testdsn;UID=SomeUser;PWD=SomePwd;") 
rxImport(DS)

If there is any problem running these commands or the test code, collect all output of the tests for support to review.