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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
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Is ODBC Connection Possible?

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    Is ODBC Connection Possible?

    I have just heard about Alpha as I am looking for a replacement for Lotus Approach. I have found many useful tips already in perusing this board.

    My specific question is this: Can Alpha5 connect to an Informix database to view/update data directly? We currently use Approach to connect to the Informix database used by our financial system so we can use current data in developing specialized reports. I am not interested in "importing" the data, only connecting to it and using it with other data created in Alpha.

    Thanks in advance for any help.

    #2
    RE: Is ODBC Connection Possible?

    Tom,

    I know that Alpha can connect to most databases if you have the correct ODBC driver. If you do not have one for Informix, you may have to go to a site like Data Direct.

    While you will be limited in what you can do with the data with an ODBC connection, you can easily append it to a native Alpha table and do the usual Alpha stuff with it.

    Your data in the Alpha table will be static, and will need to be updated as often as you need current data.

    Good luck.

    Regards,
    Jay Talbott
    Jay Talbott
    Lexington, KY

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Is ODBC Connection Possible?

      Thanks James. I have downloaded the trial version and looked through the Help. It appears that one can only "connect" to an SQL table. If I want to use any other ODBC data source, it appears I would have to import the entire original data source into a new Alpha Five table.

      Is this really the case?

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Is ODBC Connection Possible?

        I do this daily with tables that have tens of thousands of records. We automatically update our information at 6:00 and also as needed daily. We used saved operations that are run by a script to do this.

        This works well. We zap the Alpha tables before appending the SQL tables, and then use Alpha to filter records and write reports.

        Version 6 will be able to modify and change records in SQL tables, but until then, we are happy with what we do.

        Let me know if you need more help.
        Regards,

        Jay Talbott
        Jay Talbott
        Lexington, KY

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