Unable to import pyodbc on Apple Silicon - Symbol not found: _SQLAllocHandle

Question

I am currently working on a python (3.8) project on my 2021 MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon. Ultimately, the goal is to build a ML model on data I read from an Azure SQL DB using Apple's Tensorflow fork. Therefore, I am developing the project on native Apple Silicon packages - not using Rosetta.

The Problem arises when I try to import the pyodbc package (4.0.30) in order to connect to my DB. I keep getting the following error

  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: dlopen({myvenv}/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyodbc.cpython-38-darwin.so, 2):
Symbol not found: _SQLAllocHandle
  Referenced from: {myvenv}/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyodbc.cpython-38-darwin.so
  Expected in: flat namespace
 in {myvenv}/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pyodbc.cpython-38-darwin.so

If however, I do the exact same thing using Rosetta everything works fine. I couldn't find any other thread describing a similar behaviour.

Does anyone know how to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

My feeling is that the package is not compiled properly for ARM architecture.

You can uninstall the pyodbc and install it again. If using pip, it would be like this:

pip uninstall pyodbc

and install with compiling it locally:

pip install --no-binary :all: pyodbc

Do not forget on Unix/Linux like platforms, you need to download the unixodbc source distribution, as pyodbc is build against an ODBC driver manager, i.e. unixodbc is a prerequisite. Example installation with brew package manager:

brew install unixodbc