Re: database link over ODBC?

In article <ANJARVIN.96Sep6173339_at_oso1.oso.oamk.fi>,

        anjarvin_at_oso1.oso.oamk.fi (Antti Järvinen) writes:
>I'm a little green to this and this may sound very simple but:
>Is it possible to establish a database connection between oracle7.2
>running
>in NT and a non-oracle DB that does ODBC? I'm looking for something
>similar
>as database links between native oracle databases so that I could (for
>example) log to oracle database and do select to this non-oracle DB.

Yep. this is totally possible. ODBC is the way. We just did this earlier in the week to connect MS Access for Win95 to our Oracle 7.1 instance running on an SGI.

The steps are basically:

1. Install SQL*Net on your client machine running the other database
2. Test your SQL*Net connection. I did this by using SQL*Plus on the client just to see if I could connect
3. Install an ODBC driver for Oracle on the same client machine This was the tricky part for us. We had to try three different ODBC drivers before one actually worked. But we're using Windows NT 4.0 Server, which has *plenty* of other driver problems. If you're using Win95, the Visigenic driver from Microsoft works fine. Otherwise get the 32bit driver from Oracle's web site (90 free trial sales rep told me it might be free indefinately).
4. Test your ODBC connection...I did this with MS Access. You can link tables in Access to an ODBC source. Worked great...

Good luck

• James

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                        James Paul Cooper * Pixel
                         MU College of Education
       pixel_at_coe.missouri.edu - http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~pixel/
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