I played with unixodbc in the past and I was not impressed with the performance. anyway I don't think it is a problem of unixodbc, rather with ODBC being a very slow technology itself.
I am not sure about Suse but RH distros have a KDE config utility called KDE DriverManager to create ODBC connection (somthing like windoz DSN creation utility).
That will do the trick for you. Otherwise from command, odbc_config, odbcinst applets will help you.
CHeers
QatQat
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