ODBC and MySQL connectivity with Root 6.36 (and beyond)

ROOT
1

Dear Root Dev-Team,

I would like to inquire why the ODBC and MySQL connectivity was deprecated / removed in Root 6.36 (and following versions)?
At our institute, we are relying on the pre-compiled distributions of ROOT for Windows, because our IT policy only provides support for Windows-based PCs.
We wanted to update our Root distribution from 6.34.04 to 6.36.02. However, it broke all our code requiring SQL-server connections, so we had to roll back.

Is it still somehow possible to connect to a MariaDB or MySQL server under Windows with or without using ODBC in Root 6.36.02?

ROOT Version: 6.36.02
Platform: Windows 11
Compiler: Visual Studio 17.12.2

2

Hi @mtakacs,

Thanks for reporting this. The main reason we decided to deprecate (and later removed) was that we weren’t aware of anyone using ODBC at the time:

We’ll discuss this and see what we can do. Adding @bellenot, @Danilo in the loop.

Cheers,

Dev

3

Hello, same here, in the T2K/ND280 software stack we rely on the TMySQLXXX classes to access our databases. Any idea how to proceed?

4

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6

Is there any decision concerning this problem?
The mysql, odbc, and pgsql build options have been completely removed in ROOT 6.38.
Do you plan to restore them in the future?
If not, do you plan to provide any “replacements”?

These options are still present (“deprecated”) in ROOT 6.36, but you do not provide (your) binary distributions with them switched “on”.
According to your “Release and Support Schedule”, ROOT 6.36 will be maintained for the next 5 years or so (until 2030).
Could you then please start building your “official” ROOT 6.36 binary distributions so that these features are “supported” (“compiled in”) in them by default?
I suppose this would really help people from non-LHC experiments (those who currently need them as well).

7

Considered: for the subset of platforms that had binaries with odbc/mysql/pgsql enabled in 6.34, new 6.36 patch releases until 2030 will have them again enabled:

If you build ROOT 6.36 from source, you will still have to enable them during the CMake command (and will get a deprecation warning).

As far as I know are no replacements foreseen for these. As I understood from the ROOT workshop, for small features not heavily used by many users but still quite often used by a few users, that are getting removed from ROOT to easen code maintenance, core developers are offering assistance in converting them to an external library reviewed and maintained by the community that can be easily called on top of ROOT via CMake or as a header-only thing.

Then, there is always the option to have a branch in one’s 6.38 (or future 6.40) fork where one reverts [sql] remove deprecated options and code by ferdymercury · Pull Request #18634 · root-project/root · GitHub and then builds from that source.

8

The easiest way is to patch the unpacked ROOT 6.36 source code, e.g.:

sed -i -E -e '{s/(mysql|odbc|pgsql) OFF/\1 ON/}' root-6-36-00-patches/cmake/modules/RootBuildOptions.cmake