Stata 14 problems with GUI and odbc

[Orvalho Augusto]

I have just installed Stata 14 64 bits on a Linux Ubuntu 14.14 machine. It works well in general but 2 things so far are very disturbing:
1. GUI
I am using KDE environment.
The menu "statistics" menu list is not displayed on a monitor with resolution of 1366x768. I tried different DPI (between 85 to 100) and does change at all.
But when I use an external display with 1920x1080 I can see all list of the "statistics" menu.

2. odbc
It seems that Stata doesn't read correctly my odbc definitions. As I still have Stata 13 which reads well the odbc definitions.
When I run odbc list I get something like this:

. odbc list

Data Source Name Driver
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a M
b M
b M
b M
b M
b M
b M
c M
c M
c M
c M
c M
d M


Thank you!
O

[Konrad Zdeb]

Hi orvaquim,

Please note that this forum requires users to use their full names when posting. Would you consider gnome? On a number of occasions folk complained that Stata misbehaves with KDE so it's not that surprising that something is not showing as it should.

[Orvalho Augusto]

Thank you for answer.
About the KDE. I don't want to use gnome. I hope this will be fixed soon. It sounds to be lots of elements on the menu to be displayed.

Orvalho

[Kevin Crow (StataCorp)]

To resolve these two issues we will need to have a few more details about your system. Please run the below do-file in Stata and send the file odbc.log that is generated to [email protected].

log using odbc, text
about
!uname -a
query other
!odbcinst -q -d
log close

Also, we will need to know the database you are trying to connect to.

[Orvalho Augusto]

Thanks!

I don't no why the odbc.log file is not accepted for upload. Anyway below is the output you want:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
. ! uname -a

Linux cavekde 3.13.0-49-generic #81-Ubuntu SMP Tue Mar 24 19:29:48 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

. query other
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other settings
set type double may be float or double
set maxiter 16000 max iterations for estimation commands
set searchdefault all may be local, net, or all
set rng default may be default, mt64, or kiss32
set rngstate XAA00000000000000000000000000000000000000...
set varabbrev on
set emptycells keep may be keep or drop
set processors 1
set odbcmgr unixodbc may be iodbc or unixodbc
set odbcdriver ansi may be ansi or utf16

. !odbcinst -q -d

odbcinst: SQLGetPrivateProfileString failed with .

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[wbuchanan]

Are you using the iodbc driver manager or using the unixodbc driver manager? It looks like an issue with the driver manager itself from the shell output. The only issue I've had on a Linux box (Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10) is preference setting with the permanent option not being retained across sessions. On an OSX box I was able to use the of can command successfully to load data from a Postgres 9.4 instance without any problems at all.

[Kevin Crow (StataCorp)]

This problem may take some back-and-forth to track down because of the interaction between Unicode support in Stata 14, the unixodbc driver manager, your ODBC driver, and your database. The best way for us to resolve it is for Orvalho to email [email protected]. Once we have found the solution I will post back to Statalist.

[Orvalho Augusto]

Thank you!

I am using iodbc. Definitely, this is a Stata 14 thing because under Stata 13 odbc works very well.

I will send the mail as suggested.

Orvalho

[Min-Yang.Lee]

Thanks!

. !odbcinst -q -d

odbcinst: SQLGetPrivateProfileString failed with .

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This output make me guess that your odbc driver is not properly installed. When I type
!odbcinst -q -d
I get:
[OracleODBC-11g]
which is the described in my /etc/odbcinst.ini

My other guess is that the environment variables are not being set properly.
Good luck

[Kevin Crow (StataCorp)]

In the 05may2015 update to Stata 14, there is a new command, set odbcdriver, that will fix this problem. It is preferable to use a Unicode driver if your database vendor supports it and there is a Unicode ODBC driver available on your platform. If this isn't the case, however, type

set odbcdriver ansi

to specify that Stata 14 should use a non-Unicode driver; this will make it behave as Stata 13 did.

[Orvalho Augusto]

Yes. This new feature helps.

It wasn't environmental variables problem. I had very nice conversation with Stata technical support through mail.
They recognised the unicode issue on odbc. Setting odbc to ANSI it works!

Orvalho