[R] RODBC partial success

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2001, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> I finally managed to get R 1.2.2 on my Windows 2000 system to communicate with
> a database on the same system with RODBC!

And what so hard about it?

> For those of you who are not
> Windows users, there are three types of data set names you can set up: user
> DSNs, which can only be accessed by the user that defined them on the same
> system, system DSNs, which can be accessed by any user on the same system, and
> file DSNs, which supposedly can be accessed by other users. I have been able to
> connect to both user and system DSNs using "odbcConnect" with just the DSN as
> an argument, but I have not been able to find a combination of arguments that
> works for file DSNs.
>
> So my question is whether this is a bug in RODBC or if there actually is a way
> to connect to a file DSN with "odbcConnect". For what I'm doing on my home

Have you read the help page?  It says the argument should be a `registered
data source name'.  Is a file DSN a `registered data source name'?  Not to
my understanding.

As far as I understand it file DSNs are not supported, although it would be
easy for someone who wanted them to contribute the code needed.  You just
need to call SQLDriverConnect rather than SQLConnect, as I read it.

Please read the definition of `BUG' in the FAQ.

> system, user and system DSNs are fine, but I use file DSNs more or less
> exclusively at work, since most of the databases there are MS Access. Actually,
> I am treating them as shared files -- the Access database will reside in a
> shared partition on our team server (Windows 2000) and the ODBC file DSN
> resides on my workstation (also Windows 2000). The one piece I haven't tried
> is defining a user or system DSN on my workstation and pointing it to the
> shared Access database. If *that* works I don't really need RODBC to work with
> file DSNs, although it would be nice. Anybody out there been down this path??

That works for me, although it may depend how the sharing is done.  As for
our average users all writable file systems are on central servers, they
have to do it that way.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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