PHP, ODBC, DB2 in linux or macOS
A scary tale where docker saves the day TL;DR you may want to use this docker image https://cloud.docker.com/u/mkphp/repository/docker/mkphp/php-ibm-odbc How do you connect PHP to a Database? Well, you use the right driver, right? Which is usually ready for you to use out-of-the-box or at least, you just download it, enable it and that’s it . For DB2 it’s bit more complicated than that. First of all, I’m not saying DB2 is bad as a RDBMS. It has nice features and is robust. BUT… DB2 is a proprietary piece of burocratic software from IBM. It’s ancient . It’s tightly coupled with the operating system from IBM (AFAIK). By being deeply tied to the OS, it means you can’t just install DB2 in your Linux ( ubuntu, fedora, centOS, etc ), MacOS or Windows machine (just like MariaDB, MySQL, etc). Now, that’s a problem. A: What if I want to grab a copy from the database and have it locally to mess it up locally without risking stuff from staging or develop? B: You can’t do