I'm having zero luck getting the ODBC Administrator to work reliably with earlier versions of SQL Anywhere in Windows 7... one symptom is that Test Connect doesn't work, another is that the new DSN doesn't show up, another is the existing DSNs don't show up in the ODBC Administrator... soon, my head will be exploding. The SQL Anywhere dbdsn utility seems to work just fine, and is a nice workaround for creating DSNs... and the old versions of SQL Anywhere are working fine (for my purposes), all the way back to 5.5. Can someone please explain what the whole story is, with C:\Windows\system32\odbc32adm.exe versus C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe versus whatever-other-versions-might-be-lurking? |
John Smirnios posted this a while ago on the general forum (relating to 2008 server I think - but it's the same in 7 I believe):
as I said at the time: This does sound like another trimuph of the MS usability labs doesn't it - odbcad32.exe that'll be the 64 bit version then, err... unless it isn't. |
In SQL Anywhere 10, I found three reliable ways to avoid the problem. One is to always use the shortcut to the ODBC Administrator from within the connection window in the Sybase tool (such as ISQL or SCJView). That seems to always pick the correct one. My guess is this works because these programs are 32-bit programs themselves and can't use the 64-bit tools, either. Another is to go to the WINDOWS\SysWOW64 folder and run odbcad32.exe. This is a pain because we occasionally forget and spend a silly amount of time trying to figure out why the ODBC tools are behaving in an inconsistent manner. Finally, I see you've stumbled on same solution I finally found, which is to use the dbdsn command. This works flawlessly for us every time.
I'd love to be able to issue a personal thank you to whoever put dbdsn in the toolkit in the first place. It's really useful. |
Just an addition - for further reference: The newly-discovered SQL Anywhere Insider magazine has an in-depth article on this topic: January 2011 Edition: Working with ODBC DataSources on Microsoft® Windows® (32-bit versus 64-bit) |