Cannot see any objects on DB2 (AS400) database after updating to R 4.2.0

Question

When I connect to a DB2 database via ODBC using the recently released R 4.2.0 the database appears to have no objects. Connecting to AWS has no such issues, and objects a viewable using older versions of R.

I am on Windows 10, and connecting to a DB2 database (iSeries/AS400). I am using an odbc connection.

I can connect using previous versions of R (64-bit R4.0.2, and 32-bit R4.1.3 - the reason for the difference is conflicts with 64-bit versions of R 4.1.x with my OS build, but that's another story).

My recent install of R4.2.0 seems to work fine. It runs R code, I can connect to and query AWS via ODBC - but something weird happens when I try to connect to the DB2 database - The connection seems to be successful, but the database appears to contain no objects. Queries fail, with various error codes - some of which contain some non-lain characters (but are mostly English in latin script). Using older versions of R, everything works as normal - I can connect to and query the DB2 database.

One of the changes in R4.2.0 on Windows is the character set, I have tried setting the character set to the default used in older versions of R, but this does not resolve the issue. I have tried using the RODBC package, but had a similar issue.

The code I am using below:

library(tidyverse)
library(odbc)

# Connect to DB --------------------------------------------------------

conn <- dbConnect(odbc(),
                        Driver = "iSeries Access ODBC Driver",
                        Server = "my.server.location",
                        system = "MySystemName",
                        uid = rstudioapi::askForPassword(prompt = "What is your user name?"),
                        pwd = rstudioapi::askForPassword(prompt = "What is your password?"))

My session info is:

R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.utf8  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.utf8 LC_NUMERIC=C                           
[5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.utf8    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] odbc_1.3.3      forcats_0.5.1   stringr_1.4.0   dplyr_1.0.8     purrr_0.3.4     readr_2.1.2     tidyr_1.2.0    
 [8] tibble_3.1.6    ggplot2_3.3.5   tidyverse_1.3.1

Note: This is my first question, so my apologies if I miss on good practice.

Answer 1

I solved this by adding CCSID = 1252 to the dbConnect call. R 4.2 switched to unicode encoding, so you have to tell it specifically if you want to use something else.