Righteous!
Yes my directions i marked as the correct answer say to use unixODBC-devel, but I could not remember why..
zypper install unixODBC unixODBC-devel
Which I did not mention in my last post.
isql looks at users home directory for a .odbc.ini then it looks in the /etc/unixODBC/odbc.ini
Either place can have the path to the driver and make success.
"Did you power it off and back ON again?" (british Accent) "IT crowd" sitcom reference.
It is true how a restart is always a good troubleshooting technique..
SUSE documentation does say that clearing the vm cache is non destructive, I often use it after big changes and back up file uploads, of course last night I did not think of it as a solution to the errors I was getting.
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
Thank you for your patience and diligence!
Cheers,
Zachary.