Testing an SQL Database Connection to your Enterprise Database in Windows

The SQL platform offers a manner by which you can test your database connection. If you are having issues with your database connection, you can perform a test outside of the Enterprise installer to confirm your credentials are correct. See the steps below to complete the test.

Testing your connection by creating a UDL file

Create a data link (UDL) file

1. Right-click on the Windows desktop and navigate to New > Text Document. A new file is created by default (New Text Document.txt).
2. Open the Windows Explorer.
3. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options and select the View tab.
4. Untick the Hide file extensions for known file types check box and click OK (so that you can remove the .txt extension and replace with the corrrect .udl extension).
5. Right-click the text document you created in Step 1 and select Rename.
6. Change the name and extension of the file to “dbtest.udl”. When a warning message stating that changes in file extension may turn the file unusable, disregard the warning.
7. The dbtest.udl file can be stored anywhere on your system or network. You are now ready to connect to your data source.

Testing the connectivity to a SQL server

1. Right-click the testdb.udl file and choose Properties to open the Data Link Properties dialog box.
2. On the Data Link Properties, select the Provider tab.
3. From the list of OLE DB Provider(s), select Microsoft OLE DB for SQL Server.
4. Click Next to move to the Connection tab.
5. Enter the SQL server’s hostname followed by a backslash () (e.g. windows2003server>InstanceName>) in the first box.
6. Under the section Enter information to log on to the server, select the appropriate radio button:
7. If the SQL server uses Windows authentication, select Use Windows NT Integrated security.
8. If the SQL server uses SQL authentication, select User a specific user name and password.
9. Under the section Select the database on the server, click the drop-down list to view all available databases and select the required database.
10. Click the Test Connection button.
11. OK to close the Properties Window.
12. Save the connection settings.

Conclusion

This test will confirm that your credentials and pat h are correct. It is possible that there are other permission related issues if you are unable to connect to the database in the Enterprise Configuration Utility, or you may need to enable Mixed Mode Authentication. But this test can at least advise that your path and credentials for the database are correct.