Retrieving records from SQL Server with PYODBC and FreeTDS

Question

I have a python script that connects to a local SQL Server (2012, i believe?) and runs a "SELECT * from ..." query. When I run the script, I get an error saying:

File "/home/mdrouin/dev/redbus/wyndham.py", line 643, in connect

cursor.execute("SELECT * from [RentalDB].[dbo].[Clients]")

pyodbc.ProgrammingError: ('42000', '[42000] [FreeTDS][SQL Server]Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier. (4004) (SQLExecDirectW)')

After reading some other posts, I tried a suggestion another thread mentioned by adding the following to my script:

os.environ['TDSVER'] = '7.0'

However, when I do this, I get unicode escape strings (I think that's what they're called...) returned, instead of the data. This is an example of when I print a row from the table:

(u'\U00320035\U00380033\U00360033\U00300030\U00300030\U00300030\U00320031\U00320039\U00350039', u'\U00640041\U006d0061\U00520020\U004d0020\U00740061\U00690074\U0067006e\U0079006c\U00280020\U00590057\U0032004e\U00300031', u'\U00640061\U006d0061\U00390073\U006d006d', u'\U006f006a\U006e0068\U00650064\U00720065\U00390065\U00330034', u'\U00330032\U0031002e\U002e0039\U00310035\U0031002e\U00350031')

The thing I don't get is that I am running this on a VM that is set up exactly the same as another VM, and one of the VMs runs fine while the other doesn't. The other VM doesn't have either of these issues. I checked the odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini files on both computers, and they are exactly the same, so I don't know what could be causing the issues. Both VMs are running Debian 7.

Answer 1

Nevermind... I'm retarded. When I set up the VirtualEnv in Python on the VM that wasn't working, I accidentally used Python 2.6 rather than Python 2.7, which in turn only let PYODBC 2.x be installed rather than PYODBC 3.x. The older version of PYODBC was causing the issues.