Customers these days: they think they’re entitled to 64 bits.  Heck, I remember when we had to do everything with just 32 bits, and only half of those worked.

Since 64-bit Windows and Linux are the new normal, the DB2 LUW folks (particularly with 9.7) have been encouraging migration away from 32 bit apps and libraries.  Sometimes this is more than a gentle nudging, as things break and require intervention.

Colleague Allen Cartright shares a tip for managing 32-bit ODBC data sources when 64-bit Windows just wants to ignore them.  So, if you find yourself running 32-bit DB2 code on a 64-bit OS written by a 2-bit company that can’t stand 1-bit of competition, heed his advice:

The ODBC connection manager in Windows Server 2008 (Administrative Tools -> Data Sources) is 64 bit only.  To get to the 32 bit ODBC connection manager in Windows Server 2008 Rx x64 you must run the executable directly as there aren’t any icons for it.  The executable is “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe”.  This is the same executable name as the 64 bit version but is in the legacy directory.  Once you have the 32 bit version of the ODBC Connection Manager open you may add the ODBC connections as normal.

The Microsoft Knowledge Base post on this has additional information and recommends a useful naming convention:

To work around this problem, use the appropriate version of the ODBC Administrator tool. If you build and then run an application as a 32-bit application on a 64-bit operating system, you must create the ODBC data source by using the ODBC Administrator tool in %windir%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe. To indicate the type of DSN, you can add “_32” to the 32-bit user DSNs and “_64” to the 64-bit user DSNs.