Short version (Long very detailed version of what I’ve already found out and tried by request)

I have a program called HealthPro that resides on a windows 2003 SBS server. The program uses a Velocis database server 2.0 made by Raima. Information on connecting to this database is sketchy at best. I would like to get to a point where I can write a VB.NET program and throw SQL statements at it in order to make our report writing easier. While I prefer VB.NET, I’m not opposed to learning another language or skill set should it be required to accomplish this task. My boss wants me to make this a priority because of the hours we waste every year trying to crowbar the reports healthpro gives us into something we can use. I’ve automated a lot of this since I joined the company a few months ago, but it’s still a mess ATM.

The velocis client, during installation, has 2 check boxes of interest. One says "install JET 3.5" and the other says "install ODBC” According to the documentation, I'm supposed to leave JET checked and uncheck ODBC.

After the velocis client, I install DAO, again unselecting ODBCdirect.

I recently used a test machine and ignored the documentation instructions and left the ODBC boxes checked. After doing this, I'm able to go into control panel > administrative tools > Datasources (ODBC) and see a velocis data source there.

I'm hoping that I can use this to connect to velocis using a .NET ODBC object, but I don't have the slightest idea what the connection string should be. I do know the user name and password for the velocis server itself. Is this something that sounds remotely possible? I don't want to waste any more time on this if a bunch of experts to tell me it's hopeless.


Thanks for any help.
BTW, I'm mainly the network admin, but I've had to take on some programming and database responsibilities because we are a small clinic.

Hi,

Raima was sold in 1999 to a California company, Centura Software, that went bankrupt about 20 months later. The Raima intellectual property was acquired by a Norwegian company, Birdstep (www.birdstep.com). They changed the name of the product to RDM Server and still market it. You can try their support staff (in Seattle), but 2.0 is pretty out of date and they might be unwilling or unable to help. If that turns out to be the case, please contact us at McObject (the founders are ex-Raima) and we'll see if we can help.

Good luck
Steve

Thanks Steve,

I did finally manage to make a connection to the database server. Do you know if there is a way to get the table names from the server using SQL? I know how to send the statement and deal with any results, but I need help with the statement itself.

Sure, you can "select * from systable, syscolumn
where systable.tableid = syscolumn.tableid"

or for more condensed (and probably more usable) output

select systable.name, syscolumn.name, data_type, col_type from path systable to syscolumn

data_type will be an ODBC data type
col_type will be (or possibly OR'd combinations of)
0 = not specified
1 = not null
2 = unique
3 = primary key