ColdFusion and ODBC Agent

This sent a co-worker down a wrong path yesterday, so I thought I would blog it in case it tripped anyone else up.

There was a problem with one of our SQL servers yesterday. (It was down a long time during a routine patch and reboot due to extra stuff in a Microsoft Tuesday patch.) In trying to troubleshoot the issue, one of the administrators saw errors in the event logs coming from the ColdFusion ODBC Agent.

We are using default driver for Microsoft SQL Server in the drop down on the Data Sources page. Therefore, we were using JDBC driver and weren’t impacted by the ODBC error. The error message was a red herring. It took focus away from the real problem, namely that the database server hadn’t come back online yet.

Going further, as far as I can tell all of the defaults on that page are JDBC drivers, with the exceptions of “ODBC Socket” and “Microsoft Access”. According to this Damon’s comment on this blog post, the “Microsoft Access with Unicode” doesn’t even need the ODBC driver. So I would say, unless you are doing coding against Access databases, or a known ODBC only product, you probably don’t need to install the ODBC services; especially since you can always install them if you need them.

I’d be interested to know if anyone violently disagrees, or if this has been said authoritatively somewhere, and I just not up on my Google-Fu.