Problems connecting Simba ODBC with a M1 Macbook Pro

[Nico1]

Hi,

There's a way to make work the Simba ODBC Driver for M1 Macbook Pros?

I find myself able to run on an old intel version of Macbook easily, but now every time I even test the connection with the iODBC Manager fails.

Definitely, the issue is around not being built for ARM, did anyone find a solution or there's going to be shortly a release with ARM support?

Thanks in advance!

[Atanu]

Hello @Nicolino Oppes​  Currently we don't have the odbc for M1 chip and our engineering team is working on this. May be end of Q3 we can expect the release.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Thanks.

[Atanu · Accepted solution]

@Nicolino Oppes​ @Yatindra Athivarapu​ @Mengdan Liu​ 

ODBC doesn’t officially support ARM (M1) architecture. So that’s probably the root cause.However unofficially M1 rosetta emulation is capable of emulating ODBC Intel instruction on M1 and we have many scenarios that ODBC on M1 worked out of the box (Tableau with ODBC on M1 works through rosetta, etc).for short term workarounds:

• either you can try using anything other than M1 if you have other VMs, machines.
• the other option is you should play with rosetta emulation on M1 to see if there is a way to make this work (check here) this is unknown territory.
• it seems this error is coming from excel not ODBC. so maybe you can search if for excel on mac there is any way to disable that additional validation which is failing

long term simba will officially add support for M1 to ODBC (that’s in their backlog, probably will be ready sometime in Q4 or so).

[Yati]

Hey @Atanu Sarkar​ 

Since we are near the end of Q3, are we expecting a release of ODBC server for M1?

[MengdanLiu_]

Hi @Atanu Sarkar​ , hope you are doing well. May I know if the release of ODBC for M1 chip will be released or not? Thank you.

[Nico1]

Hi Databricks Team and @Atanu Sarkar​ ,

Could I please kindly have an update on the Driver status? There's a deadline in place?

Thanks in advance.

[kunalmishra9]

Wanted to follow up here as well! 

[Atanu]

@MengdanLiu_  I see from internal note customer is using odbc for M1 . so it's supported now.

[kunalmishra9]

I'm ~99% sure that ARM (and Apple Silicon Macs, by extension), are not yet supported. Went down many rabbit holes to attempt configuration of the Databricks ODBC driver and wasn't able to get it up and running. 

The evidence suggesting a lack of support:

1. The release notes of the Databricks Spark SQL drivers make no mention of it
2. Similarly, the release notes indicate a new version hasn't been released since 2022-07-12, which predates the first reply to OP.
3. In my Terminal, the command `file /Library/simba/spark/lib/libsparkodbc_sbu.dylib` shows compilation for `i386` and `x86_64`, but not `arm64e`.
4. During my rabbit hole exploration to set up ODBC, I stumbled across blogs like this one, indicating the issue still exists and requires a rather massive lift to solve for when using with R & RStudio.

[Atanu]

I have installed to my M1 chip Mac on Friday,.

I will be doing a couple of testing. and share the update.

[kunalmishra9]

Have good news to report on this end:

- A new version of the ODBC driver was released on 2023-09-08 (I spoke with a Databricks engineer the day prior about this) 

- The latest version of the driver is indeed compiled for arm64 and supports Apple Silicon natively

- Still working to get things set up but there was at least progress on this

[kunalmishra9]

Things seem to be mostly working for me now. I've added a bit more detail on my connection steps and process in case it's helpful for anyone on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76407426/connecting-rstudio-desktop-to-databricks-community-edit...