One of the new features in PostgreSQL 9.1 that we've been meaning to try is the new foreign data wrapper support. Now that we are in compile mode gearing up for releasing PostGIS 2.0.0 for windows (both 32 and 64-bit), we thought we'd give the odbc_fdw a try trying to compile on windows. Last we tried we weren't successful because we couldn't get past the -lodbc required step.

It turns out there is an easy fix to the ODBC dependency issue and I'm not sure I changed the line right. In the makefile we changed -lodbc to -lodbc32. This was needed for both compiling 32-bit as well as the 64-bit. We compiled the 64-bit version under our Mingw-64 chain and 32-bit under our old Mingw gcc 3.4.5. Sadly we still don't have our mingw64 (compile for windows 32-bit compile up yet). Our ming64 for windows 32 can compile the 9.2 development branch but not the 9.1.3. Go figure. Anyrate to make a long story short -- we have 32-bit binaries for PostgreSQL (you can use in VC++ builds) and 64-bit binaries as well that you can use for the VC++ EDB builds for those who are interested in experimenting. PostgreSQL 9.1 Windows 32-bit ODBC FDW   PostgreSQL 9.1 Windows 64-bit ODBC FDW

So far we've tried the PostgreSQL 64-bit data wrapper against a SQL Server 2005 DSN and it seems to work fine. Have yet to try it on other ODBC sources. We'll write up a more detailed article describing how to make the connections.

There is one trick to getting Mingw64 compiled PostgreSQL extensions to work with the Windows 64-bit EDB builds, and that is that when you compile your PostgreSQL under mingw64, you have to configure with option ----disable-float8-byval as we noted in our PostGIS Window 64 build instructions.