Are there logs for ODBC errors?

[jimatqsi]

I have a client running Access 2003 with a SQL back end. They are reporting a number of ODBC errors recently and complaining the system is crawling. (Each ODBC error takes about 1 minute to come up)

Is there a place where I can find a log that would tell me more about these errors?

Thanks,
Jim

[Stewart Ross]

Hi Jim. You can use the ODBC driver administrator's trace facility to generate a log file of activity between a particular start and stop time, as outlined in this MS support article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274551.

-Stewart

[jimatqsi]

Thanks, Stewart. I'm going to try this but I'm not sure it's what I want. I'm actually looking for error logging and this is tracing, which I presume is a recording of every ODBC call. Using this will degrade system performance.

Jim

[Stewart Ross]

Turning on tracing does indeed degrade performance to an extent (also referred to by MS in their support article).

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any actual error logging facilities that are built in to ODBC.

When I've used the trace option myself it was to find out what was going on in an ODBC instance that had suddenly stopped functioning altogether after 18 months of normal functioning. What the trace showed in that case was that the driver was unable to communicate with the remote system and was continuously timing out, as a result of a software issue at the 'other' end.

I don't know if the system event logs built in to Windows capture ODBC errors under the networking heading or not. Failing that there may be third-party tools available for this purpose, but I don't know of any off hand.

-Stewart