Pre-Emptive SQL Connections
March 8, 2007 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
For my “day” job, I work with a number of custom database applications that we develop. One of them being our complete task, CRM, project management solution. Normally, my business partner and I are connected to each other through the same network or a switch so I can almost always see his machine and run off a single copy of the SQL database back end connection.
Today though is a different story, I ended up having to work remotely at a coffee shop so needed to run off my local back-up copy of the database. The only problem is that when I used my standard link to the application running on my machine, it keeps telling me it can’t find the database. NO DUH!
No instead of forcing me to step through a long series of one-option dialog boxes, how about you let me have another box that immediately lets me jump into my connection settings and tell it to look at my local SQL server and not my partner’s?
If someone’s got a solution for this, PLEASE let me know, because it doesn’t happen frequently enough to be a huge issue, but becomes annoying quickly everytime I have to deal with it.
As the developer of the program Jason is cursing, I have to confess that the problem is caused by simply failing to provide a decent handler in the program (I should NEVER expect a connection before I provide a splash-screen and config/connect options). But alas, this is home-brew for home-consumption (our internal, firm use) and so I short-cut this and just slapped a form into the “startup screen” and let users curse me.