odbcping

The odbcping utility is a good diagnostic tool that allows you to test a client machine's ODBC connectivity to your database server. It uses this syntax:

 odbcping { -Sserver_name  -Ddata_source }

Unlike makepipe and readpipe , odbcping runs only on the client. You can use odbcping whenever you need to verify that a client's ODBC connectivity is properly configured. You can also incorporate the use of odbcping as part of an installation procedure.

You can run odbcping in two ways. You can execute odbcping- Sserver_name to test a client's direct connectivity to SQL Server. You can also run odbcping- Ddata_source to use the specified data source to connect to SQL Server. In either case, if successful, odbcping displays the version of SQL Server and the version of the SQL Server ODBC driver.

The following example shows a simple odbcping execution (using the SQL Server name ) and the resulting output:

 >odbcping Swin2000svr\instance1  CONNECTED TO SQL SERVER ODBC SQL Server Driver Version: 03.80.0380 SQL Server Version: Microsoft SQL Server  2000 - 8.00.384 (Intel X86)         May 23 2001 00:02:52         Copyright (c) 1988-2000 Microsoft Corporation         Developer Edition on Windows NT 4.0 (Build 1381: Service Pack 6)

TIP

For Windows 2000 clients , a new utility named PathPing is also available for troubleshooting TCP/IP connectivity problems. Given a target server name, this utility will display the computer name and IP address for each router as it moves toward its destination. If successfully connected to the destination server, the utility echoes reply packets (messages) to the client machine to indicate that TCP/IP connectivity exists. For Windows 9.x and NT clients, the Ping utility, which has less functionality, is available instead.

The odbcping utility is not installed as part of the SQL Server 2000 installation, but it can be copied from the installation disc.