Connection Problems

If you are unable to get past the sign-on window then you are having problems with the database connection. If you are lucky you might get an informative error message, however this is often not the case. Non-technical users of AQT should contact their Database support team.

Many things can cause connection problems, most of which are outside the control of AQT:

• The ODBC datasource is not configured correctly or the database does not exist.
• The database is not started or cannot be accessed due to a communications problem.
• The user-id and/or password are not valid.

For information on how to configure a connection to your database, see Configuring a Database Connection.

Signing onto a database is a surprisingly complicated subject – see More info on Database Sign-on for a fuller explanation.

Try the following actions if you encounter connection problems:

• Try connecting from ODBC Setup

  This will tell you whether it is a problem with the ODBC connection, or a problem with AQT.

  Many ODBC Setup drivers have a “Test Connection” option which is very useful (get into this by selecting the database and hitting Configure).

• Try connecting from another product

  Alternatively, try accessing your database from a product such as MS Access (File > Get External Data > Link Tables. Select Files of type > ODBC Databases. Select tab Machine Data Source then select your database. [What a lot of work just to sign onto a database. :) ]

• Prompted Sign-on

  One thing you can try is a Prompted Sign-on. Select this by setting Advanced > Prompted Sign-on. In this mode the ODBC driver will prompt you for connection information. This gives you better control of seeing and specifying any particular connection parameters.

• Prompt for Missing Info

  This is like Prompted Sign-on but only prompts you for connection parameters that are not currently present. In many cases this is a more suitable option than Prompted Sign-on.

User-id has No Password

If your user-id has no password you can’t just leave the password field blank; AQT will assume you are doing an “integrated logon” and specify neither the user-id nor password in the sign-on request.

In this case you need to check Advanced > No Password.

“Error Requesting Parameters”

You may get a message such as “error requesting parameters required to complete a connection”. If you get this then you haven’t specified enough information in your ODBC configuration:

• for MS SQL Server and Sybase you can get this if you have specified the name of the machine to connect to, but not the database name (eg. master).
• for MS Access you get this if you did not specify the name of the mdb file.

In both cases, select the database and hit Configure. Correct the settings.

Alternatively you can specify the Database when you log on. Select Advanced and fill out the DBName box.

IM026

DB2 users will get this if the c:\sqllib\bin directory has not been set in their PATH. The DB2 client install (for some releases) fails to do this.

System Hangs with message “Loading Schema Information”

If you are a DB2 user and you get this, the probable cause is that the “ODBC packages have not been bound against the database”. This may not mean much to you, but it should to your DBA. If you are the DBA then you can bind these by

• going into the Client Configuration
• selecting the database
• clicking on Bind
• selecting Bind Db2 Utilities.

Connecting to Oracle

If you are having problems connecting to Oracle see Oracle - Diagnosing Connection Problems