Please note. I will not be developing this any more. For useful ODBC in nodejs check out node-odbc
A hacky solution for querying ODBC data sources (including MS SQL) with nodejs.
Rather than develop a C++ module for nodejs that would bind to the unixODBC libraries, I have hacked the original isql tool to accept SQL queries via stdin and then output the resulting recordset via stdout using JSON encoding. I call this tool isql-json.
Using the nodejs child_process class, we can spawn a process of isql-json and pass queries to it via the child_process's stdin stream and receive responses via the child_process's stdout stream.
This is by no means a finished product. There is still a ton of error handling and optimizations that need to be addressed.
Use at your own risk.
On an Ubuntu machine you need to make sure you have odbc installed:
apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev
If you are going to be querying a MS SQL server, be sure to install the tds packages:
apt-get install freetds-bin freetds-common tdsodbc
Get the source for node-unixodbc-isql-json from github:
git clone git://github.com/wankdanker/node-unixodbc-isql-json.git
In the isql-json directory, do the standard configure and make
cd isql-json
./configure
make
Modify sql.js to include the proper DSN, userName and password for your data source
Try it out:
node sql.js
select top 10 * from tableName