Troubles with JDBC-ODBC, DSN-less connection strings, and 64-bit Windows 7

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3808633

Question

I'm dealing with an issue that has arisen for an application I've been working on which connects to a Access file via JDBC-ODBC. On other Windows platforms, this issue hasn't been encountered, but on Windows 7 64-bit boxes, attempting to connect with DSN-less connection strings return:

java.sql.SQLException: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified

Multiple variations on the string have been attempted, but all of them have returned the same error. Here's how it currently tries to connect:

  Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");

  StringBuffer databaseConnectionString;

  if (SystemUtils.IS_OS_WINDOWS_7) {
       databaseConnectionString = new StringBuffer("jdbc:odbc:DRIVER=Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb);DBQ=");
       databaseConnectionString.append(databaseFile);

  } else {
       databaseConnectionString = new StringBuffer("jdbc:odbc:Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ=");
       databaseConnectionString.append(databaseFile);
       databaseConnectionString.append(";DriverID=22;READONLY=false}");
  }

Examining the driver in the 32-bit ODBC Data Source Admin confirms that the drivers are present. However, when regedt32.exe is used to examine ODBC drivers (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/ODBC/ODBCINST.INI/ODBC Drivers), none of them appear.

Can anyone help to shed some light on this?

Was it helpful?

Solution

I found the problem was that I was running the program in 64-bit Java. Although I have yet to successfully have the program detect if it's running in 32-bit or 64-bit Java, I have solved the solution by installing a 32-bit Java runtime environment and using a .bat file that reads as follows:

@echo off

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\java" -D32 -Xmx1024m -jar programName.jar

Thanks for the help!

OTHER TIPS

This was a difficult challenge given the paucity of meaningful error messages from JAVA or MS's ODBC driver. The answers above about down selecting to 32bit Java and MS Access drivers (using AccessDatabaseEngine.exe from MS) did work but cost a significant penalty (about 30%) in processing other actions compared to using 64bit Java. I was unwilling to pay this price so I installed 64bit Java (in conjunction with 32bit, both in a separate directory c:\Java\32 or 64). This latter directory issue was important for me since I was using Apache Geronimo and it would not start if Java was installed in Program Files (x86)... as the (x86) seemed to kill its batch file parsing. I then uninstalled 32bit MS Access and installed 64bit MS Access (AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe). Finally, it worked with both higher speed and MDB connection.

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