Death of ODBC

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.

ChrisLee at 2007-9-9 >

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

LukaszPawlowski at 2007-9-9 >

Hey DillanJoe

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

Cheers

kiwilamb at 2007-9-9 >

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

YasinMo at 2007-9-9 >

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

YasinMo at 2007-9-9 >