This section provides basic information about configuring your driver immediately after installation, testing your connection, and accessing your data with some commonly used third-party applications. To take full advantage of the features of the driver, read "Using the Driver".
Information that the driver needs to connect to a database is stored in a data source. The ODBC specification describes three types of data sources: user data sources, system data sources (not a valid type on UNIX/Linux), and file data sources. On Windows, user and system data sources are stored in the registry of the local computer. The difference is that only a specific user can access user data sources, whereas any user of the machine can access system data sources. On Windows, UNIX, and Linux, file data sources, which are simply text files, can be stored locally or on a network computer, and are accessible to other machines.
When you define and configure a data source, you store default connection values for the driver that are used each time you connect to a particular database. You can change these defaults by modifying the data source.
