Death of ODBC

ODBC is not supported as a data source in SQL Analysis Services 2005.

ODBC is not supported as a data source in SQL Reporting Services 2005 Model Designer.

Any thoughts?

Joe

Don't read too much into this, ODBC is not going away anytime soon. We put a lot of effort into SQL Native Client, which contains the ODBC driver for SQL Server 2005.

|||Chris,
But I must use ODBC to connect to a Progress database - not SQL Server. There does not seem to be any way to accomplish this in Analysis Services 2005 or the RS Model Designer.|||

With regard to Model builder - in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services supports building models on top of Analysis Services and SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 data source.

This is not to be read as a 'death of ODBC', rather it reflects the significant effort required to support a particular data source for semantic modeling purposes. Essentially what Reporting Services does under the covers is:
1) Evaluates the schema and content of the data source to determine what entities, attributes, and roles (relationships) exist. It also looks at how much data is in the tables, and applies some heuristics based on patterns in the data to determine a good best guess as to what the model should look like.
2) Once you have a model, RS translates from semantic queries into underlying data source queries. In doing so we have dependencies on the behavior (and existence) of query language specific functions.

Between these two things, there is a ton of potential failures across an interface like ODBC - we don't know if the underlying data source supports the actions we're going to try to perform. If we let you do this, it would lead to a very fragile system with many uncertain behaviors. As such we decided to limit the set of data sources that are supported in SQL Server 2005 to AS and SQL 2005 and SQL 2000.

Hope that helps,

-Lukasz

|||Lukasz,

Thanks for your reply. I can see from your explanation that it's not easy to support ODBC in the Model Designer.
- Are there any plans to support ODBC in the future?
If not then as far as the Model Designer goes - ODBC is dead.

What I find even more worrying is that SSAS 2005 does not support ODBC - there must be users out there who have developed a solution in SSAS 2000 & ODBC who will want to upgrade.

Don't get me wrong - I think the Model Designer, etc. are fantastic - I just wish I worked for a company who used SQL Server! All this ODBC stuff is getting me down...|||

Hey DillanJoe

I'm attempting to use ssas 2005 to connect to a postgres database did you have any luck connecting via ODBC?

Cheers

|||

kiwi,

I've not looked at SSAS for many months and I have not had any luck using ODBC with it. If you make some progress please post here!

Good luck

|||

Hi Lucaz

Will a .net data provider work better then ODBC (eg http://crlab.com/pgsqlnet/download.html).

my customer wants to buid and query report Builder 2005 models against a Postgress data base.

Regards..Yasin

Auckland, New Zealand

|||

Hi Yasin

Have you had any luck with this product, it looks like a good option.

Derek

|||

Hi Derek,

No, not yet. The customer is thinking over it. We might do the linked server option. Then build all the Primary keys/FK's on the FE (SQL server end).

Ping me in a month and I will let you know.

Regards ..Yasin

|||

Hi,

I am facing a problem connecting to a progress db from .net 2005, when i test the connection, (odbc) is says fine (successful)., then when i try connecting it says connection string is not correct.,

any one knows a driver update or something?