firebird-odbc-driver

Firebird ODBC driver for Firebird 3.0 and later.

Downloads

Download the latest release from the GitHub Releases page.

Platform	Files
Windows x64	.msi installer, .zip archive
Linux x64	.tar.gz archive

Connection String Parameters

Required Parameters

Parameter	Aliases	Description	Example
DRIVER	-	ODBC driver name	Firebird ODBC Driver
DBNAME	DATABASE	Database path or alias	localhost:C:\data\mydb.fdb

Authentication Parameters

Parameter	Aliases	Description	Default
UID	USER	Database username	(none)
PWD	PASSWORD	Database password	(none)
ROLE	-	SQL role to assume	(none)

Optional Parameters

Parameter	Aliases	Description	Values	Default
DSN	-	Data source name	Any valid DSN	(none)
CHARSET	-	Character set for connection	UTF8, WIN1252, ISO8859_1, etc.	NONE
CLIENT	-	Path to Firebird client library	Full path to fbclient.dll/so	(auto-detect)
DIALECT	-	SQL dialect	1 or 3	3
READONLY	-	Read-only transaction mode	Y or N	N
NOWAIT	-	No-wait lock resolution	Y or N	N
TIMEOUT	-	Connection timeout (seconds)	Integer	0 (disabled)
QUOTED	QUOTEDIDENTIFIER	Enable quoted identifiers	Y or N	Y
SENSITIVE	SENSITIVEIDENTIFIER	Case-sensitive identifiers	Y or N	N
AUTOQUOTED	AUTOQUOTEDIDENTIFIER	Auto-quote identifiers	Y or N	N
USESCHEMA	USESCHEMAIDENTIFIER	Schema handling mode	0, 1, 2	0
LOCKTIMEOUT	-	Lock timeout for transactions	Integer (seconds)	(none)
SAFETHREAD	-	Thread-safe operations	Y or N	Y
PAGESIZE	-	Database page size (creation only)	4096, 8192, 16384	8192
ENABLECOMPATBIND	-	Enable compatible bindings	Y or N	Y
SETCOMPATBIND	-	Set compatibility binding mode	Firebird compat string	(none)
ENABLEWIRECOMPRESSION	-	Enable wire protocol compression	Y or N	N

Parameter Details

DBNAME / DATABASE

Specifies the database location. Supports multiple formats:

• Local: C:\data\mydb.fdb or /var/lib/firebird/mydb.fdb
• Remote: servername:/path/to/db.fdb or servername:C:\path\to\db.fdb
• TCP/IP with IP: 192.168.1.100:/path/to/db.fdb
• Custom port: servername/3051:/path/to/db.fdb
• Alias: myalias (defined in Firebird's databases.conf)

CHARSET

Sets the character encoding for the connection. Common values:

• UTF8 - Unicode (recommended)
• WIN1252 - Western European (Windows)
• WIN1251 - Cyrillic
• ISO8859_1 - Latin-1
• NONE - No character set translation

DIALECT

SQL dialect controls parsing behavior:

• 3 - Modern Firebird/InterBase 6+ mode (recommended)
• 1 - InterBase 5 compatibility mode (deprecated)

USESCHEMA

Controls schema name handling:

• 0 - Set NULL for SCHEMA field (default)
• 1 - Remove SCHEMA from SQL queries
• 2 - Use full SCHEMA support

QUOTED / SENSITIVE / AUTOQUOTED

Identifier handling options:

• QUOTED=Y: Allows quoted identifiers (e.g., "MyTable")
• SENSITIVE=Y: Makes identifiers case-sensitive
• AUTOQUOTED=Y: Automatically quotes all identifiers

SAFETHREAD

• Y - Enable thread-safe connection handling (default, recommended)
• N - Disable thread safety (use only in single-threaded apps)

Build from sources

Prerequisites

Install PowerShell (v7+), then run:

./install-prerequisites.ps1

This installs the required PowerShell modules (InvokeBuild and PSFirebird).

On Linux, you also need the unixODBC development package:

sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev

Building

Invoke-Build build -Configuration Release

This runs CMake to configure and build the driver. The output is:

• Windows: build/Release/FirebirdODBC.dll
• Linux: build/libOdbcFb.so

Testing

Invoke-Build test -Configuration Release

This will build the driver, download Firebird 5.0, create test databases, register the ODBC driver, and run the full test suite with multiple charset configurations.

Available tasks

Task	Description
build	Build the driver and tests (default)
test	Build, install driver, create test databases, run tests
install	Register the ODBC driver on the system
uninstall	Unregister the ODBC driver
clean	Remove the build directory

Alternative: Visual Studio

After running cmake -B build, you can open build/firebird-odbc-driver.sln with Visual Studio 2022 or later.

Development & Feedback

• https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-odbc-driver