As part of my new role, we’ll be working with HP’s Vertica for some of the data storage. I’ve been struggling the last few days to get it working on a Vagrant-provisioned linux box (VirtualBox) and finally have the process down. I thought I’d share it for those out there needing some help. I’m working with a Ubuntu server box, but these instructions could be pretty easily adapted to other distros:

1. Ensure you have the Unix ODBC package installed. This is what PDO uses to connect to the Vertica instance:

sudo apt-get -y install unixodbc

2. Ensure that your PHP installation has PDO support with ODBC handling:

php -m | grep -i odbc

You should see something like “PDO_ODBC” there if it’s installed.

3. Grab the latest Vertica linux drivers from the My.Vertica site (requires a login). Click on the Downloads section and scroll all the way down to the drivers. Grab the right ones for your linux installation. I used the Linux ODBC 64-bit.

4. Make a “/opt/vertica” directory on your system and untar the archive there.

sudo mkdir /opt/vertica
sudo tar zxvf vertica-odbc-6.1.3-0.x86_64.linux.tar.gz -C /opt/vertica/ > /dev/null

5. Create the configuration files where needed. There’s three of them – odbc.ini, odbcinst.ini and vertica.ini. Here’s the examples and the paths for them:

In /etc/odbc.ini:

[VerticaDev]
Description = Vertica Dev
Driver = /opt/vertica/lib64/libverticaodbc.so
Port = 5433
ServerName = your-hostname-here.com
DatabaseName = database-name
UserId = database-username
Driver = Vertica

In /etc/odbcinst.ini:

[Vertica]
Description = Vertica driver
Driver = /opt/vertica/lib64/libverticaodbc.so

In /etc/vertica.ini:

[Driver]
DriverManagerEncoding=UTF-16
ODBCInstLib = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libodbcinst.so.1
ErrorMessagesPath=/opt/vertica/lib64
LogLevel=4
LogPath=/tmp

If all goes well, you should be able to make a script like this to test it:

<?php
$dbName = 'your-database-name';
$hostname = 'your-hostname.com;
$account = 'your-username';
$password = 'your-password';
$driver = 'Vertica';

$dsn = 'Driver='.$driver.';Server='.$hostname.';Database='.$dbName;
$pdo = new PDO('odbc:'.$dsn, $account, $password);
var_export($pdo);
?>