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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T03:02:54+00:00

I need to connect and send/receive information from an MS SQL server in my

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I need to connect and send/receive information from an MS SQL server in my Lotus Notes app using @formula in realtime (I can connect using an agent, but I need to use inline code for this).

The commands themselves seem pretty straight forward, but setting up the configurations seems to be a topic with scarce documentation. Apparently I need to install an ODBC driver. Where would I find that, and do I install that onto the server or onto the workstations that will run this app?

If any Lotus gurus could step me through setting this up, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

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  1. Editorial Team

    You’ll need to install the ODBC driver on the workstations that run this app, if the users will be triggering the ODBC connections. If at all possible, I highly suggest setting this up on the server side, and having it run via an agent. That’ll save you from a few headaches, including having to maintain the ODBC connections on each workstation and worrying if each workstation has access to the data and server.

    You first just want to make sure your ODBC setup is correct. You’ll need the appropriate driver, of course, and the connection information. This site has a walkthrough to give you an idea of how to setup an ODBC database connection

    If you have MS Access you can use it to test querying from the ODBC data source. Once you’ve tested the connection works, you’ll just refer to the data source name (DSN) in your @DbColumn, @DbLookup, or @DbCommand formulas.

    Back to my suggestion on setting this up on the server side, that would mean you’d keep a copy of the data you’re querying within the Notes database itself, and then users would be interacting with read-only data in Notes. You could schedule updates regularly on the server side of that read-only data and effectively create a cache of the data in your Notes environment. Then that data would replicate around to other replicas of the database, but remove the trouble of the ODBC connection being needed everywhere.

    If you need realtime data, though, that solution is out the window and you’ll have to go with a local solution. In that case, you might want to look at the LCConnection class or using an ADODB.Connection from script, as both will allow you to create DSN-less connections to data sources. You’d then save the trouble of requiring ODBC data sources on each workstation, and only have to worry about whether they can access the server from their workstation.

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