Connecting to the up.time DataStore via ODBC

The default up.time DataStore uses a MySQL database although MS SQL and Oracle are also supported. The DataStore can be accessed for custom reporting or data warehousing by using an ODBC connection with various tools such as MySQL Query Browser, Microsoft Excel and Crystal Reports.

Before accessing the DataStore, you must install the MySQL ODBC driver on the client system that will be accessing the database. You can download the Windows ODBC driver from the MySQL web site. This driver enables the client system to communicate with the up.time MySQL database. Note that the examples in this article are based on MySQL Connector / ODBC 5.1.8 using Windows 7.

After installing the MySQL ODBC driver, create a Data Source on the client system that will be used to access the database by following these steps:

1. Browse to Administrator Tools in Windows and open ODBC Data Source Administrator.
   
   

   

2. There are three types of ODBC Data Source Names (DSN): User, System and File. A User DSN can only be used by the user that created it; a System DSN can be used by any user on the system and File DSN just saves the settings to a file that can be shared across multiple systems. The following example creates a User DSN (leave the User DSN tab selected) so only our user can access it. Click the Add button as shown above to open the following dialog box:
   
   

   

3. Select the MySQL ODBC 5.x Driver option and click Finish.
   
   

   

4. Enter the settings in the Data Source Configuration dialog box (similar to the image above), replacing the hostname with the hostname of your up.time server. The password for the reports user is "reports." Note that the reports user is a MySQL user with limited permissions that can only run queries from remote systems.

You should now be able to connect to the up.time DataStore through a number of applications. For detailed information, please refer to your application documentation.