ODBC Driver 13.0 for Linux Released

Microsoft has announced the “Production Ready” release of the new ODBC Driver 13 for Linux (Ubuntu, RedHat, and SUSE). This new driver will allow access to SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL DW from any C/C++ application on a Linux device.

• Native Linux Install Experience: The driver can now be installed with apt-get (Ubuntu), yum (RedHat/CentOS) and Zypper (SUSE).
• AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AG): The driver now supports transparent connections to AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The driver quickly discovers the current AlwaysOn topology of your server infrastructure and connects to the current active server transparently.
• TLS 1.2 support: The driver now supports TLS 1.2 connections to SQL Server.

Example: Install the ODBC Driver on RedHat 6

sudo su
yum-config-manager --add-repo https://apt-mo.trafficmanager.net/yumrepos/mssql-rhel6-release/
yum-config-manager --enable mssql-rhel6-release
wget "http://aka.ms/msodbcrhelpublickey/dpgswdist.v1.asc"
rpm --import dpgswdist.v1.asc
yum remove unixODBC #to avoid conflicts during installation
yum update
yum install msodbcsql
yum install unixODBC-utf16-devel #this step is optional but recommended*