I’ve been struggling this on macOS too - I’m on an M1 MacBook. I have the QA SQLite database installed and have validated the schema as correct with DBBrowser. I installed the database & ODBC drivers with brew install sqlite and brew install sqliteodbc. Testing the sqliteodbc installation with brew test sqliteodbc reveals the location of the .so to be /opt/homebrew/Cellar/sqliteodbc/0.9998/lib/libsqlite3odbc.so and I have set this in the /opt/homebrew/etc/odbcinst.ini files (as found by odbcinst -j).
Unfortunately, this fails with a database connection failure (and I believe I have tried every combination in the connection string!)
Symbol library 'qa_dblib' failed to load.
Could not load database library: could not connect to database KiCad (/Users/vagrant/kicad/thirdparty/nanodbc/nanodbc/nanodbc.cpp:996: 0100: [unixODBC][Driver Manager]Can't open lib '/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sqliteodbc/0.9998/lib/libsqlite3odbc.so' : file not found )
The missing file is definitely there and the path is correct.
After nearly giving up, I installed the DevArt ODBC drivers as a demo. Just setting the ‘dsn’ details in the .kicad_dbl file resulted in a connection and I could place symbols from the test database.
So there is definitely something slightly flaky here with the normal ODBC drivers & it might be worth trying the DevArt ones.
I will plug away at this a bit more to see if I can produce a more useful bug report.
[Disclaimer] I have absolutely no commercial connection with DevArt.