How to set up an ODBC manager?

["Richard C. Cobbe" <cobbe@directlink.net>]

Greetings, all.

I'm trying to play around with writing a small ODBC client program, just to
learn how the technology works.  Rather unfortunately, I'm highly unclear
on how to set up all of the pieces involved.  I've installed the following
packages on my Potato system:

odbc-postgresql
postgresql
postgresql-client
postgresql-dev
postgresql-doc
postgresql-slink
libiodbc2
libiodbc2-dev

And I'm trying to use the SrPersist client which fits into DrScheme
(http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/srpersist/).

I don't know how to hook all these pieces together, though.  I know I need
a driver manager; I had thought that libiodbc2 provided this.  However, my
impression (possibly incorrect) was that a driver manager is a daemon,
rather than just a shared library, and libiodbc2 includes only a .so.  Am I
missing a package?

The postgres docs on ODBC connectivity seem to assume a basic knowledge of
ODBC.  For instance, in discussing ~/.odbc.ini,

    The third required section is [ODBC] which must contain the InstallDir
    keyword and which may contain other options.

    [ODBC]
    InstallDir = /opt/applix/axdata/axshlib

It provides, however, no further details as to what the InstallDir option
means, what its value should be, or what the other options for this section
are.  Neither does the libiodbc documentation explain any of this.

Can anyone point me to some basic documentation for setting up an ODBC
client and server on a Debian machine?  I'd prefer online content, but I'm
willing to purchase a book if I have to.

I'm currently using PostgreSQL, and I'd prefer to stick with that.  I could
switch to another backend like MySQL, though, if that becomes necessary.

Thanks in advance,

Richard