Postgresql Odbc Driver Windows 7 32 Bit Portable Online

It was 2018, and I was maintaining a legacy production line reporting system for a mid-sized manufacturing plant. The core database was PostgreSQL 9.6 running on a Linux server. The front-end was a vintage Windows 7 Professional 32-bit machine in the quality control lab. On this machine ran an ancient Excel 2010 VBA macro that pulled defect data every 15 minutes, generated charts, and printed them to a network label printer.

For five years, it worked perfectly. Then one Monday, the chart stopped updating. postgresql odbc driver windows 7 32 bit

But the connection failed even with the 32-bit driver. I ran psql from the same machine — worked perfectly. Firewall, network, credentials — all fine. It was 2018, and I was maintaining a

The VBA macro threw error -2147467259 (Unspecified error) at the conn.Open line. The data source name (DSN) was configured in User DSN using the PostgreSQL ANSI(x64) driver. Except… Windows 7 32-bit doesn’t have an x64 driver. That was my first clue something was very wrong. On this machine ran an ancient Excel 2010

The Excel VBA code was using ADODB.Connection and setting CursorLocation = adUseClient . The PostgreSQL 32-bit ODBC driver, version 9.3+ on Windows 7, had a known but rarely documented bug: when adUseClient was set before opening the connection, the driver failed to negotiate the bytea type mapping correctly with the 32-bit PostgreSQL client library — especially if any column in the queried table was type bytea (even if not selected). The driver would throw a generic -2147467259 instead of a meaningful error.

I opened the ( C:\Windows\System32\odbcad32.exe ) — no DSN listed. Opened the 32-bit version ( C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe ) — the DSN was there, but it was marked as using PostgreSQL ANSI (no x64). So far so good.