Connecting to Vertica

Vertica is essentially a fork of PostgreSQL, so a lot of what can be said about PostgreSQL applies to Vertica as well.

Encodings

# Python 3.x
cnxn.setdecoding(pyodbc.SQL_WCHAR, encoding='utf-8')
cnxn.setencoding(encoding='utf-8')

# Python 2.7
cnxn.setdecoding(pyodbc.SQL_WCHAR, encoding='utf-8')
cnxn.setencoding(str, encoding='utf-8')
cnxn.setencoding(unicode, encoding='utf-8', ctype=pyodbc.SQL_CHAR)

Bear in mind, after setting up your odbcinst.ini and odbc.ini files, you will still need to set up a vertica.ini file (see here) which defines, among other things, the driver manager encoding.